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In 1978 a Mexican archaeologist-the appropriately named Matos Moctezuma-and
his colleagues began to excavate a great temple. Their discoveries revealed
a complex of sacred Aztec buildings, the smallest and oldest of which lay
like a kernel in a nut at the centre of successively larger and more elaborate
temple buildings. The story of the Aztecs is one of the threads in Brian
Fagan’s entrhalling account of pre-Colombian America in Kingdoms of Gold,
Kingdoms of Jade (Thames and Hudson, pp 240, £16.95), which ranges
from the Clovis people to a discussion of whether independent invention
or diffusion accounts for the building of pyramids found from Mexico to
the Andes.