Michoacán, the place of the fishermen, once rivalled the Aztecs
Michoacán's name means place of the fishermen, after those who worked Lake Pátzcuaro. Its Purépecha Empire stood as a rival to the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived, yet the region's story reaches back to hunters who left spear points beside mammoth bones before about 2500 BC.
The western Mexican state has a Pacific shoreline to the southwest and borders six states, including Jalisco, Guanajuato and Guerrero. It is divided into 113 municipalities, and its capital, Morelia, once called Valladolid, was renamed for José María Morelos, a local son and hero of the War of Independence. Purépecha people still live there in large numbers, alongside smaller Otomi and Nahua communities.
Early settlers were hunter-gatherers whose fluted points turn up with mammoth and bison remains, mostly around Lake Chapala. Maize pollen from about 1500 BC hints at more people than excavations show. The El Opeño culture, lasting from roughly 1500 to 800 BC, dug shaft tombs stocked with pottery and figurines, and by the late Preclassic at least three regional cultures, told apart mainly by burial ceramics, lived in small villages, some built on marsh islands.
Between about AD 400 and 900 ceremonial centres with pyramids, plazas and ball courts rose among the villages. The Zacapu basin's settlements doubled and doubled again, reaching 58 sites by the end of the Late Classic. Tombs at El Otero held 42 people with jade and turquoise, and Tres Cerritos yielded an alabaster mask in Teotihuacán style. Whether such objects reflect trade with that great city or elites fleeing its collapse is unresolved, because much of the digging was hurried salvage work that left the deposits poorly dated.
After the conquest the Purépecha domain became a Spanish province that shrank over the colonial era, and the state later played a large part in the independence war. Today farming, ranching, fishing, mining and crafts drive the economy. Morelia's pink-stone cathedral and aqueduct won UNESCO listing in 1991, the monarch butterflies winter in its parks, and Day of the Dead on Janitzio and in Pátzcuaro is often ranked the most elaborate in Mexico. The Parícutin volcano rises near Uruapan.
Source: Michoacán
