Zona Arqueológica Tamohi

Tamohi, also known as El Consuelo after the ranch it stands on, or simply as Tamuín, was a town of the Huastec (Teenek) people on the right bank of the Tampaón River, one of the rivers that form the Pánuco, about 6 km south of the town of Tamuín. Its Teenek name has been translated as "place of effervescence" or "where the water swirls". It dates from the last centuries of the pre-Hispanic Huasteca, on the northern edge of Mesoamerica, and was abandoned early in the Spanish conquest. At its height it may have had around 10,000 inhabitants.

The town spread over more than 200 hectares. Because the river flooded often, the important buildings stood on natural rises and large platforms, while ordinary people lived on terraces on the neighbouring slopes, with their houses and gardens. River trade mattered: there were landing places and ramps up which traders and visitors climbed to the market and meeting spaces. The Huasteca paid tribute to the Aztec empire in painted cotton mantles, dried chilli, cacao, greenstone, copal, rubber, natural tar and feathers.

Only about 0.6 per cent of the site has been excavated. What you visit is a rectangular platform about 6 metres high facing east, carrying nine main buildings over more than 8,000 m²: five large bases frame a plaza open to the east, with three smaller structures in the middle. Everything is built of rammed earth faced with river cobbles and coated with lime stucco; some terraces had underground kilns for firing pottery. The main altar keeps its mural painting: a procession of richly dressed figures bearing the attributes of Quetzalcóatl beneath a stepped-fret band. Round structures are another hallmark of Tamuín's architecture.

The first explorations were by Wilfrido Du Solier in 1946, who uncovered the main plaza and the painted altar; in the late 1970s Leonor Merino Carrión and Ángel García Cook carried out conservation work. The Huastec Adolescent was found on El Consuelo ranch, a sandstone figure of a naked youth carrying a child on his back, regarded as a masterpiece of Huastec art; the original is in the National Museum of Anthropology and a replica in the Museo Regional Potosino. It is a small, lightly visited site; the same municipality also holds Tamtoc, the great Huastec city on the Tampaón.