The Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezumafounder of the Archaeological Project of the Main temple of the Mexicas, received this Friday in Oviedo, Spain, the Princess of Asturias Award 2022 in Social Sciences in a ceremony presided over by the Spanish monarch Philip VI and the princess of Asturias, Leonor de Borbón y Ortiz, at the Campoamor Theatre.
In awarding the award, the award jury highlighted the work of “a scholar and promoter of the Mexican pre-Hispanic world (…) a great promoter of this field of knowledge, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma has developed his fieldwork in archaeological sites such as Comalcalco, Tepeapulco, Bonampak, Teotihuacán, Cholula, Tula, Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlán, among others”.
After receiving the recognition, Matos said that the awards are not only for those to whom they are awarded but also, he said, “for the institutions that supported us in the course of our academic career and for the teachers who trained us,” and then he cited the National Institute of Anthropology and History, to which he has belonged for more than 60 years and of which he is today an emeritus researcher and, by name, recognized the imprint left on his academic life by figures in anthropology and history such as Román Piña Chan, Johana Vollhaber, Miguel Messmacher, Manuel Gamio, Gordon Childe, Miguel León-Portilla and Alfredo López Austin; as well as “those who arrived in Mexico as a result of the Spanish Civil War, and who were a beacon of wisdom, their names: José Luis Lorenzo, Juan Comas, Pedro Armillas and Pedro Bosch Gimpera”, he expressed in front of various representatives of society Spanish.
In his acceptance speech for the award, the ‘master archaeologist’ highlighted that “Penetration into the past to bring it to the present has been the work that I have carried out constantly throughout my life. That modern time machine that is archeology was the means to transpose time itself and reach the peoples who preceded us in history”.
The reception of the award was also a platform to express his intimate convictions: “History is relentless in its judgments, one cannot try to manipulate it or commit the nonsense of misrepresenting it; a bad counselor is ignorance that often leads to lies,” said the archaeologist.
“History is written by the people, they are forgers of better futures,” he said.
Look forward
“Mexico and Spain are linked by indissoluble ties,” the winner reiterated what he said when he heard the news of the award last May. And he added: “What our two countries are today, came from centuries ago wrapped in their own histories; in the year 1521 they came together, and the meeting of two different ways of thinking occurred, of societies that had their own vision of the universe (…) we cannot anchor ourselves in the past and hold grudges, but look forward, In this, Mexico and Spain must move towards a promising future”
Finally, he concluded by once again expressing gratitude to the Spanish Crown, the Princess of Asturias Foundation, and its promoters of the award. “These awards that we receive today in the house of the muses are a hymn to intelligence; universities and academies are the spaces where thought and reason are cultivated”, said Matos Moctezuma, to immediately thank the National Autonomous University of Mexico and its rector, Henry GrayYet the Mexican Academy of Language and its director, Gonzalo Celorio, for having proposed and promoted its candidacy for the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award.
