The Tarascans have always been super interesting to me, considering their differences with their neighbors. Always wondered how they might have turned out if it wasn't for the Spanish.
Land of Sweetness: A Pre-Columbian Timeline
- Thread starter Every Grass in Java
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If kind of been thinking of the Isatians as Greeks, and by that analogy you could call the Tarascans para-Macedonians.
I been thinking the Prophetess as islam, tarscans as rome and Ah Ek Lemba as Macedonians/ alexander the great
The Prophetess had an air of "abrahamic religion meets Spartacus".
Somewhere in Kabulistan, a Mughal ancestor is sneezing.
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You know, I kinda wish the royal chroniclers would document the king's death. Given the deep rabbit hole of history that is TTL's Mesoamerica, a little morbid humor shouldn't be put away.
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While y'all wait for the next post, which should be coming tomorrow probably, here's a mildly terrifying reconstruction of three Aztec instruments (skull-whistle, rattle, drum) that I found (begins at 0:30):
Like so much of Mesoamerican culture, the skull-whistle isn't specifically mentioned in the ethnographic sources, but archaeologically it seems to have been used during human sacrifice. The "death whistles" that reproduce human screaming that you'll also see on YouTube aren't really accurate, nor are their claims that the skull-whistle was used for war.
This link includes an archaeologist's two-second reconstruction of a skull-whistle at the bottom that is even more disturbing.
Like so much of Mesoamerican culture, the skull-whistle isn't specifically mentioned in the ethnographic sources, but archaeologically it seems to have been used during human sacrifice. The "death whistles" that reproduce human screaming that you'll also see on YouTube aren't really accurate, nor are their claims that the skull-whistle was used for war.
This link includes an archaeologist's two-second reconstruction of a skull-whistle at the bottom that is even more disturbing.
Considering the context in which it would be performed, this is probably the most eerie piece of music I've ever experienced. Sent chills through my body.
Thanks, @Every Grass in Java, now I have to find more to listen to.
Entry 43: Cholōllān
CHOLŌLLĀN
“Nopilé, in tlā Cholōllāmpa xonyauh, monequiz yohuac tonyāz. Īpan calli ca mētztōnaz, in moch āltepētl teōcuitlachīhuaz, auh in cuīcatōtōtl ticcaquiz ahtiquittaz—auh iuhqui cuīcazqueh in cīcitlāltin…”
“My son, if you are going to Cholōllān, go at night. The moonlight awash on the buildings will make all the city silver, and you will hear the songbirds, but not see them—and it will be as if the stars are singing…”
“Nopilé, in tlā Cholōllāmpa xonyauh, monequiz yohuac tonyāz. Īpan calli ca mētztōnaz, in moch āltepētl teōcuitlachīhuaz, auh in cuīcatōtōtl ticcaquiz ahtiquittaz—auh iuhqui cuīcazqueh in cīcitlāltin…”
“My son, if you are going to Cholōllān, go at night. The moonlight awash on the buildings will make all the city silver, and you will hear the songbirds, but not see them—and it will be as if the stars are singing…”
With an estimated population of 150,000, Cholōllān in 1390 stands among the largest cities of Mesoamerica.
The priests of Cholōllān have taken care to see that their city is the most beautiful on earth, dotted with temples and shrines, pavilions and pyramids, every street swept meticulously by a veritable army of slaves. The butterflies are everywhere, fluttering about like living flowers, waltzing in blurs of red and white and fresh-leaf-green. Sometimes the butterflies take naps on Plumeria leaves. The children try to catch them there, snapping their hands excitedly—then burst into tears when they open them, find nothing but powdery butterfly scales, and look up to see their would-be victim soaring above in search of less child-prone neighborhoods.
As my eyes track the butterfly’s dance away, they spy an oddly terraced mountain in the city center, towering above every building. Not a mountain, I chide myself. That is the new Great Pyramid that the priests have built recently, seventy meters high, with thirteen steps for the Thirteen Heavens. At some distance lies the old Great Pyramid, the one they say was built by the giant Xelhua thousands and thousands of years ago. The priests have newly renovated Xelhua’s Pyramid too, removing all the accumulated earth that had made newcomers take the pyramid for a natural hill. Even then, it is lower than the new one. What people these priests are, to build bigger mountains than giants can.
Passing by, one pavilion in particular catches the eye. It is built of wood, but I could hardly know that, covered entirely as it is in curtains of quetzal feathers. The feathers droop down like the vines of some fantastical plant, gleaming in the sun. Gold made green, I think, but even that is not compliment enough; gold is metallic, hard and cold and dead, but this is soft to the touch and green as the healthiest plants. But what do I say instead? As I struggle to come up with a better turn of words, a gentle breeze pushes the feather curtains in, and the pavilion breaks out into the music of flutes.
I stroll through narrower streets, heading toward the great market, and run into one of those small places they call a “bookshop,” something unique to Cholōllān—I have trouble still with the idea that you can buy a book like you’d buy a bean or sandal, but the Cholōltecs say everything can be bought, even land. The shopkeeper sees me come inside and chatters to me excitedly in broken Isatian, with a Mixtec accent so heavy that I barely understand anything. I explain to him that I too speak Mixtec.
“Wonderful! It gets lonely here sometimes, see, you hear far too much Isatian and far too little Mixtec. So which siña”—the word means Mixtec city-state—“do you come from?”
“Ah, no. I’m from Mēxihco. Mēxihco-Tenōchtitlan. I’m here to sell gold, you see.”
“Mēxihco? What a funny name! Where’s that?”
“A miserable little place in the middle of Lake Texcoco, and I’m glad I’ll never see the place again. Do you know where Lake Texcoco is?”
“Of course. I fancy myself a geographer, you know. But tell me more about this Mēxihco. I’ve never heard of the place, and I’ve heard of most places.”
“Mēxihco-Tenōchtitlan is a small and inhospitable island in the middle of the lake. My ancestors settled there because all the land worth living in was taken. There’s really not much more to say. And what brings you here to Cholōllān?”
“I knew I wanted to travel, see everywhere in the world. But how could I see all the world? Well… I can never visit all the world, but all the world comes to Cholōllān.”
The nature of Cholōltec “Empire”
The invention of the sail and the rise of maritime trade tipped the scale of power definitively in the favor of coastal port-states and the few inland kingdoms—the Tarascans, the K’iche’ Maya—lucky enough to possess rare natural resources.
This posed a potentially existential threat to the easternmost Nahuas, the Mixtecs of the southern hills, and the Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca: all peoples neither inland enough to be safe from coastal attack nor coastal enough to benefit from maritime trade. The Tamaltecs of the gulf coast began to meddle in the affairs of the Nahua city of Tlaxcallān. In Mixtec country, the port-city of Yucu Dzaa united the Pacific Coast and began exploiting marriage ties with inland kings in an effort to extend its influence into the highlands.
The Zapotecs faced a situation yet more dire. The coastal Huave people of the south had long been raided and enslaved by the Zapotec kings of the Oaxaca Valley. The tables turned in the fourteenth century, when Quizii, a port-town founded by an Isatian-speaking mercenary married to a Huave princess, smashed Zapotec army after army. Soon the troops of Quizii were entering the Valley of Oaxaca in force, even sacking Zaachila, the greatest Zapotec city-state in Oaxaca. Seeing the disarray of their neighbors, the Mixtecs began to migrate into the Valley from the other direction, and the Zapotec lords could no longer ignore the possibility that their future would be that of a defeated and humiliated subject people.
The inland lords must have come to the realization that their disunited polities were vulnerable to the new kingdoms of the coast, and that there was only one candidate to bring about such wide-ranging unity.
Cholōllān was an Isatian-speaking city in the northern highlands of venerable antiquity, renowned for its status as the main cult center of the Feathered Serpent god. When the priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcōhuātl (the saintly figure Ah Ek Lemba so arrogantly claimed to be) went into exile, it was at Cholōllān that he had stayed. Befitting its sanctity, the city had no secular rulers. It was ruled directly by the tlalchiach and the aquiach, the two head priests of the Quetzalcōhuātl priesthood.
Thousands of pilgrims flocked to Cholōllān annually, including many men of importance; upon their succession, most eastern Nahua and many Mixtec kings went on pilgrimage to Cholōllān to be officially crowned by the tlalchiach and aquiach. European observers might have been reminded of Holy Roman emperors with the Pope. The pilgrims brought wealth and exotic goods with them, and Cholōllān prospered as an economic as well as ideological center.
The holy city was thus well-placed to lead the inland cities in a defensive alliance.
We do not know when Cholōllān’s alliance system emerged, but it was certainly operating by the 1340s. In 1344, Yucu Dzaa attacked the Mixtec kingdom of Añute, whose king had been crowned at Cholōllān. The king appealed to the tlalchiach and aquiach, and they sent out a call to war to all the other kings and chiefs they had crowned, saying that their brother was under attack. The next dry season, more than a hundred thousand troops pooled south, annihilated the Yucu Dzaa army, and almost sacked the port-city itself before returning in the face of the rainy season. Yucu Dzaa never ventured north again.
Using the cult of Quetzalcōhuātl to mobilize the armies of hundreds of scattered city-states, the tlalchiach and aquiach intervened actively to maintain the independence of the cities whose rulers they had crowned. Though the Feathered Serpent was never a major deity in the Zapotec pantheon, most Zapotec kings chose to buy protection from Quizii by going on pilgrimage and being crowned by the two priests. In the Valley of Mexico, insulated from most foreign threats, Nahua kings nonetheless began visiting Cholōllān simply for the added legitimacy and the adventure of seeing the greatest city on earth.
By the 1390s, Cholōllān’s defensive alliance stretched almost from sea to sea, covering nearly the entirety of western Mesoamerica. Dozens of kings came to be crowned every year, each of them bringing wondrous gifts for the priesthood on the backs of hundreds of slave porters. Though the tlalchiach and the aquiach maintained no foreign garrisons and undertook no offensive campaigns, they had made themselves the head of an informal empire.
Of course, as there were no foreign garrisons and no offensive campaigns, there was no Pax Choloteca. Wars between Cholōllān-crowned kings raged on everywhere, and the priests did not intervene so long as a foreign power was not brought in. Little kingdoms and mini-empires rose and fell, often in the lifetime of a single ruler. New kingdoms were still being founded under the tlalchiach and aquiach’s sheltering wings. One such kingdom was Mēxihco-Tenōchtitlan, a particularly unimportant polity of lake-scum-eaters founded atop a dismal swamp in the Valley of Mexico.
* * *
Cholōllān IOTL was a major pilgrimage center for Quetzalcōhuātl, ruled by two priests titled tlalchiach and aquiach, and large numbers of eastern Nahua and northern Mixtec kings did in fact visit the city for their official coronation by the Quetzalcōhuātl priests. Royal genealogies on both sides make clear the dynastic links between the two peoples; archaeologically, eastern Nahua and Mixtec sites are united by a characteristic art style called Mixteca-Puebla. TTL’s defensive alliance never existed of course, but it’s again a matter of OTL things taken further along, not of total innovation.
John M. D. Pohl’s an expert on the area. For brief summaries, see his chapters “Creation Stories, Hero Cults, and Alliance Building: Confederacies of Central and Southern Mexico,” “Ritual Ideology and Commerce in the Southern Mexican Highlands,” and “Royal Marriage and Confederacy Buildings among the Eastern Nahuas, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs” in The Postclassic Mesoamerican World.
Entry 44: The Great Pyramid of Cholōllān
THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHOLŌLLĀN
The Cholōltec priesthood coordinated major infrastructural projects, including the construction of a system of roads that connected the city to the Valley of Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Huastec coast, making war, pilgrimage, and trade all vastly more efficient. At Cholōllān, they accepted gifts of mind-boggling quantities of birds to erect a pavilion draped in curtains of quetzal feathers. But the greatest project of all was the new Great Pyramid.
Cholōllān had long been home to the world’s largest pyramid, a 65-meter-high, 450-meter-wide brick construction completed in the ninth century AD. By volume, if not in height, this old Great Pyramid far dwarfed Khufu’s tomb in Giza, and by the Postclassic era legends had it that a giant named Xelhua had built it. Xelhua’s pyramid still dominated the horizon centuries later—much to the displeasure of tlalchiach Cuahuittani, who announced the construction of a new and grander pyramid in 1341.
The new 70-meter-high Great Pyramid was completed only in 1398, by which Cuahuittani and three subsequent generations of tlalchiachs had passed away. But his vision of a pyramid with thirteen steps, incarnating in the mortal world the Thirteen Heavens of Nahua cosmology, survived.
The following description of the Great Pyramid draws entirely on historical accounts, which is known to have been unrealistically embellished and exaggerated. For instance, covering the tenth Yellow Step alone would require feathers in the billions…
1. The Moon Step.
This first step represented the Heaven of the Moon, where the Moon and the clouds were suspended and rain originated.
The sides of the Moon Step were covered with finely carved white stucco. Turquoise carved in the form of clouds, and the moon’s daily phases shaped with arsenical bronze, protruded from the stucco at regular intervals. Here and there niches were dug in where the priests cultivated flowers and grew butterfly larvae. When blooming season came, the living butterflies danced amid the marble clouds, and it seemed as if the silver moons had descended on a flower-field.
2. The Star Step.
The second step represented the Heaven of the Stars, the abode of the constellations.
The stuccoed sides of the Star Step were painted black like the night sky, interrupted by little spheres of gold, silver, and copper that stood for the stars. The major constellations—the Big and Little Dippers, Scorpio, Taurus, the Pleiades—were shown, and on the north and south sides the Milky Way was represented by four hundred little metal spheres each. At noon, when the sun shone with full force on the southern façade of the Pyramid, the Star Step’s Milky Way would glitter brighter than the night sky’s one.
3. The Sun Step.
The third step represented the Heaven of the Sun.
The Sun Step was also stuccoed, but its colors were different. The east and south sides, facing the Sun’s rise and zenith, were painted red, but the north and west were left white. On three of the sides, the Sun’s tēctlahcuilōlli glyph was reproduced three-dimensionally as a carved ball of gold, jade, and white and purple marble, and all along the sides there were tēctlahcuilōlli narratives in relief of the Sun’s creation.
(The Pyramid’s staircase was on its western side, so there was no place for the Sun there.)
4. The Venus Step.
The fourth step represented the Heaven of the Big Star, where Venus was said to move.
The stuccoed Venus Step was painted a soft pink, the color of dawn when the morning star appeared. Venus itself was represented by large spheres of guanin, a gold-silver-copper alloy, each of the four sides having 146 of them in an undulating snakelike array. Together, this made 584 Venuses, and 584 is Venus’s synodic period (the number of days it takes for the planet to return to the same phase in the night sky). The serpentine array of Venus spheres were laid out in 263 curves, referencing the 263 days during which Venus is observable as the Morning Star.
5. The Comet Step.
The fifth step represented the Heaven of the Smoking Stars, from where comets fell.
The Nahuas believed that comets portended ill fortune and that the light from a comet could lead to the spontaneous generation of worms. The Comet Step thus had no metal on which sunlight could reflect; everything was stuccoed and colored in with paint, the background in black and the comets themselves in yellow. The sole exceptions were 29 spheres of gold on each side that represented the planet Mercury. (116 is Mercury’s synodic period.) The Comet Step was also the last stuccoed step.
6—7. The Night and Day Steps.
The sixth step represented the Heaven of Deep Green, the nighttime sky. The Night Step was entirely encased in sheets of green jade.
The seventh step represented the Heaven of Blue, the daytime sky. The Day Step was encased in thin sheets of turquoise mosaic. On some very clear days, it is said, observers would have trouble differentiating between the Day Step and the blue of the sky and wonder how the six upper steps could be levitating in the air.
8. The Storm Step.
The eighth step represented the Heaven of Creaking, the sky of storms, darkness, and death.
The Storm Step was plated by sheets of obsidian glass glued together, intentionally shattered and made jagged and protruding. Five wooden mechanisms attached to the sides of the pyramid, two beside the staircase and three for the three remaining sides, manipulated the wind to simulate the creaking of things falling apart. On windy days, the Storm Step sounded as if it were preparing to break apart as in a storm, and even the priests felt their heart beat faster as they passed the stairs.
9—11. The Feathered Steps.
The ninth, tenth, and eleventh steps represented the Heavens of White, Yellow, and Red, the home of the upper gods. Mesoamericans were masters of featherwork, and these three steps were insulated in thick layers of exotic feathers, with tēctlahcuilōlli motifs in darker colors woven in. All sorts of birds were specially raised in pens by the priests for their feathers, and indeed Cuahuittani ordered thousands of roseate spoonbills to be transported to highland lakes for easier feather harvests.
The White Step was covered in the white feathers of eagles, quails, herons, and ducks, with motifs in grey turkey feathers.
The yellow feathers of warblers, parrots, and oropendulas coated the Yellow Step. There were no good birds with orange feathers in Mesoamerica—the one candidate, the scarlet macaw, was already being used in the upper Red Step—and so the featherworkers of Cholōllān resorted to tapirage, a revolutionary innovation in featherworking newly learned from traders who had visited the Siki Empire. In tapirage, a normally green parrot had its feathers plucked and its naked skin doused with flower paste and frog secretions. For unknown reasons, this made the parrot grow orange-yellow feathers instead of green ones. For equally unknown reasons, this worked only on some species of parrots and never for non-parrots.[1] But who cared about the reasons? What mattered was that it produced the perfect shade of orange for the Yellow Step that nature had failed to invent.
The Red Step was all covered in the soft pink plumage of roseate spoonbills, a coastal flamingo-like bird that the priests introduced to the highland lakes, with the tēctlahcuilōlli motifs woven in in the more vivid feathers of the scarlet macaw.
[1] We now know that the color of parrot feathers is primarily a mixture of two chemical pigments, the blackish melanins and the brighter psittacofulvins. Tapirage suppresses the former, leaving the yellow and red of the psittacofulvins alone to be displayed. Tapirage is not as successful on most birds because all non-parrots use drabber carotenoid pigments rather than psittacofulvins.
12. The Temple Step.
The Temple Step was in marble, representing Tēteōcān, home of the greatest gods. Atop it stood altars for sacrifice, and shrines to the four gods of the four directions: the culture hero Quetzalcōhuātl, the war god Tezcatlipōca, the sun god Tōnatiuh, and Xīpe Totēc, the flayed god. Here the human sacrifices would be made, the hearts placed on stone vessels and the lifeless, excised bodies thrown down the seventy meters of the pyramid.
13. The Place of Mystery.
In the middle of the Temple Step was the final thirteenth step, the one the city’s inhabitants called the Place of Mystery, also of marble. It represented the Place of Duality where the cosmos’s generative energy originated.
There were two very small shrines atop it, one plated in jade and the other in gold. The doors to both were always closed, and nobody knew what lay inside.
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If you put my maps together, you get a political map of all of Mesoamerica one hundred years before Columbus:
Here's the explanations for the gaps in the maps:
Here's the explanations for the gaps in the maps:
- Gap between Tarascan territory and Cholōltec sphere of influence. As mentioned, this is contested territory between the two powers. The rulers of the local city-states, who usually pay tribute to both Urecho and Cholōllān, are ethnically Matlatzinca, Otomi, and Mazahua. None of the three are very important peoples.
- Gap between Tamaltec territory and Cholōltec sphere of influence. Again, this is contested territory. The region is probably majority Totonac. IOTL the Totonacs migrated toward the coast in the fourteenth century, but this has not happened ITTL.
- Big gap between the Gulf Coast kingdoms, Quizii, and Ah Ek Lemba's realm. This forested area is controlled by small chiefdoms and states speaking Mixe-Zoque languages to the west and Mayan languages to the east. Due to the harsh terrain and the lack of important resources, the region remains an underdeveloped periphery.
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I guess it just goes without saying at this point, but beautiful update, yo. The description of the Great Pyramid was really evocative in particular.
Holy fuck, is there an equivalent to this in OTL Mesoamerican architecture, because that's a fantastic addition to a temple step devoted to tempests. I imagine it would require some maintenance, but that's a small price to pay for harnessing the sound of the storm for the faithful to experience.
Is this identification of deities with the cardinal directions something from actual Nahua myth or an addition to your TTL civilization's religious belief?
Holy fuck, is there an equivalent to this in OTL Mesoamerican architecture, because that's a fantastic addition to a temple step devoted to tempests. I imagine it would require some maintenance, but that's a small price to pay for harnessing the sound of the storm for the faithful to experience.
Is this identification of deities with the cardinal directions something from actual Nahua myth or an addition to your TTL civilization's religious belief?
This is such an amazing and detailed and beautiful timeline.
Some questions I have though:
Whats the main crop production throughout Mesoamerica, Oasisamerica, and the Caribbean? Food wise and cash crop wise.
Also is their any chance of seeing more animal husbandry? I know we saw Llamas in the Panama area, but are turkeys domesticated? Are they more widespread? What about dogs have they made it to the Caribbean? Any chance another animal is domesticated or at least kept for food production or pleasure? (Tapir, capybara, ocelot?)
Some questions I have though:
Whats the main crop production throughout Mesoamerica, Oasisamerica, and the Caribbean? Food wise and cash crop wise.
Also is their any chance of seeing more animal husbandry? I know we saw Llamas in the Panama area, but are turkeys domesticated? Are they more widespread? What about dogs have they made it to the Caribbean? Any chance another animal is domesticated or at least kept for food production or pleasure? (Tapir, capybara, ocelot?)
Not to my knowledge, and even ITTL there's dispute as to whether these devices actually existed.
Yes, although it's from the religion of the Aztecs, a specific segment of the Nahua people, and we don't really know to what extent the OTL Cholōltec Nahuas followed it. According to OTL Aztec mythology, the generative force Tonacatēuctli engendered the four creator gods, titled the Four Tezcatlihpōcas. Each of the Four Tezcatlipōcas was assigned a specific cardinal direction:
- The north was the realm of the Black Tezcatlihpōca, also named simply Tezcatlihpōca (meaning "Smoking Mirror"). The north was the direction of death, night, and darkness; out of the twenty day signs, Jaguar, Death, Knife, Dog, and Wind were assigned to it.
- The south was the realm of the Blue Tezcatlihpōca, also named Huītztzilōpōchtli (meaning "Left Foot like a Hummingbird"). The south was the direction of the Sun, fire, and war, and its day signs were Flower, Grass, Lizard, Vulture, and Rabbit.
- The east was the realm of the Red Tezcatlihpōca, also named Xīpe Totēc (meaning "Our Lord the Flayed One"). The east was the direction of vegetation, rebirth, and fertility, and of the day signs Alligator, Reed, Serpent, Movement, and Water.
- The west was the region of the White Tezcatlihpōca, also named Quetzalcōhuātl (meaning "Feathered Serpent"). The west was the direction of old age and sustenance, with the day signs Deer, Rain, Monkey, House, and Eagle.
The main difference between OTL Aztecs and TTL Cholōltecs is that Huītztzilōpōchtli, the patron god of the Aztec people, has been replaced by the more conventional sun god Tōnatiuh (tōnatiuh in Nahuatl literally just means "Sun"). This is more realistic because absolutely nobody but the Aztecs ever thought that Huītztzilōpōchtli was relevant, and indeed the Aztecs stole attributes of other more established gods like Quetzalcōhuātl, Tōnatiuh, and the rain god Tlāloc to aggrandize their patron.
I put a different god named Camaxtli in the original post by mistake, but I've just corrected that to Xīpe Totēc.
The Valley of Mexico is endorheic, which means that rivers don't flow out of it. So there is really no easy way for the Aztecs to reach the coast, as of now...
The staple crops in Mesoamerica and Oasisamerica remain the Mesoamerican Trinity of maize, beans, and squash, maize especially. All three are also consumed in the Caribbean, but the Yucayans also grow large quantities of cassava and sweet potatoes. All sorts of plants that people have never heard of are also cultivated for supplementary food, from A. acanthochiton to Z. integrifolia. The non-food cash crops grown include cotton, cacao, rubber trees, dye-producing plants (e.g. achiote), wood-yielding trees (e.g. bulletwood), and narcotics (e.g. tobacco, yopo). Cotton is by far the most important.
Turkeys were already domesticated and fairly common before the POD, as were dogs in the Caribbean.
While never specifically mentioned, I assume guinea pigs have become common throughout Mesoamerica by this point. The Yucayans have also gone fairly far with the taming of giant rats called hutias, which have spread to some parts of Mesoamerica. (I imagine the Nahuas might call guinea pigs cualquimichtōntli, "tasty little mouse," and hutias cualquimichpōlli, "big tasty mouse.")
Some Mesoamericans, both OTL and TTL, have also experimented with keeping tamed white-tailed deer and collared peccaries in pens for food, and both are being managed on increasingly large scales ITTL. Peccary behavior is actually fairly conducive to domestication... but there's really not enough time for them to evolve into the Americas' variant of pigs. Suffice it to say that Mesoamerica is not suffering from protein deficiencies.
Both IOTL and ITTL, Mesoamerican kings keep exotic animals in royal menageries (mentioned, e.g., in Entry 42), including jaguars, pumas, wolves, coyotes, crocodiles, even bison. These are hardly going to be domesticated any time soon, of course.
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Was the Tarascan syllabary an independent development or could it have been taken from the Yucatan/Isthmus via trade?