Close to the limit between the Federal Enclosure of Lake Texcoco and the San Bernardino ejido there is a surveillance booth on a heap of dirt. The booth is painted with the institutional colors of Mexico’s National Water Commission: white and light blue for the walls, and red for the gable roof. Next to the booth there is a weed-covered lot, crossed by furrows perhaps drawn by a plow. A few meters away from the booth there is a fence made of wire and concrete stakes. On the other side of the fence, in the ejido, some hen run around in the tall grass. There are some scattered constructions. The heap of dirt supporting the booth stands out like a protuberance a meter high or less. It rises visibly over a plateau miles wide. In the soil, some brown chunks crack when treaded upon: they’re shards of broken vases, clayware, jugs, shapeless figurines, all buried in the middle of the field. The ceramic fragments sprinkled with the soil’s black hue were once dinnerware: in Mexico, this pre-Hispanic ceramic is still referred to with the Náhuatl word tepalcate. [...]
Tepalcate
in ENCYCLOPEDIA