June 2015. About a three-hour flight from Costa Rica. Using a long break from work, I went to Mexico for the first time. Mexico City, where I landed, sits at 2,240 m above sea level — a sprawling capital with thin highland air. From a Central American perspective it can feel like "the Spanish-speaking country next door," but the depth of civilization here is on a whole different scale. With that hunch in mind, the first place I headed on day one was the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology).
Tucked into one corner of Chapultepec Park, this is the institution that embodies Mexico's pride in its own past. It covers everything from ancient Mesoamerica to Indigenous cultures across the country, and is regularly ranked among the great museums of the world.
An overwhelming concentration of antiquity
The depth and breadth of the displays is staggering. Aztec, Maya, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Toltec — civilizations whose names you only knew from a textbook line up here in real artifacts behind a single sheet of glass. "Seeing the real thing" doesn't quite capture it; the air itself feels denser.
The Sun Stone — the Aztec circular calendar
The museum's signature exhibit is the Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol). A single 3.6 m wide, 24-ton monolith carved with an entire Aztec cosmology. At the center is the sun god Tonatiuh, surrounded by the four previous suns (eras) and the symbol of the current fifth sun. Outside that ring sit the twenty day-names, and on the outermost edge two serpents wrap around the universe — the structure of the world itself, packed into one stone. An astonishing object.
It left such a strong impression that later, while browsing a souvenir shop on the Yucatán Peninsula, I didn't hesitate to buy a miniature Sun Stone fridge magnet. It's still on my refrigerator today.
Coatlicue and the Olmec colossal heads
Standing alongside the Sun Stone in sheer impact are the Coatlicue statue and the Olmec colossal heads.
Coatlicue is the Aztec earth mother. Her head is rendered as two snake heads joined together, her necklace is strung with human hearts and severed hands, and her belt is made of skulls. An ancient view of life and death, sculpted with no filter — the sort of figure that overwhelms you just by being in front of it.
The Olmec colossal heads, meanwhile, were left behind by Mexico's oldest civilization — the Olmec (around 1500–400 BCE). Over 3,000 years ago, someone carved a human head, scaled up to roughly 2 m tall, out of a single block of stone. Wide noses, thick lips, a helmet-like cap — features that some have read as African, fueling debate over ancient cultural exchange that continues to this day.
Skulls and death deities — Mexico's view of mortality
One motif keeps appearing through the galleries: the skull. Skulls as ornament, skulls as gods, skulls as the boundary between life and death. The sensibility we now know from modern Mexico's Día de los Muertos was already in place in ancient Mesoamerica.
The clearest example is a display tied to the Aztec lord of the underworld, Mictlantecuhtli. The museum holds a life-size ceramic figure of a priest serving the death deity, dressed in Mictlantecuhtli's regalia and emblems. Rather than an image of the god himself, it's better understood as a human figure embodying death-related divinity in a ritual setting. It's not a literal skeleton, but the rigid posture and distinctive ornaments still convey the Mexica ritual world built around death.
For an even more literally skeletal representation of Mictlantecuhtli, the Templo Mayor museum has a piece I've shown in Mexico City Historic Center: Walking the Zócalo, Templo Mayor, and Cathedral — Mexico Tour Notes #1.
Death not as fear or taboo, but as something that lives right next to life — that aesthetic feels like a single thread running unbroken from the Olmec 3,000 years ago all the way to the Catholicized Mexico of today.
On day one in Mexico City, this museum hit me with the full thickness of "Mexico" all at once. From here on, every street I walked and every site I visited would feel like an extension of what I saw inside these halls — the perfect place to start a journey.