Social Memory In Ancient And Colonial Mesoamerica

In Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica, Amos Megged uncovers the missing links in Mesoamerican peoples' quest for their collective past. Analyzing ancient repositories of knowledge, as well as social and religious practices, he uncovers the unique procedures and formulas by which social memory was communicated and how it operated in Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest. Megged's volume also suggests how social and cultural historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists can rethink indigenous representations of the past while taking into account the deep transformations in Mexican society during the colonial era.

Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities’ histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors’ stories. In Mesoamerican Memory, volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from contributors around the world to compare these various memories and explore how they were preserved and altered over time. Rather than dividing Mesoamerica’s past into pre-contact, colonial, and modern periods, the essays in this volume emphasize continuity from the pre-conquest era to the present, underscoring the ongoing importance of indigenous texts in creating and preserving community identity, history, and memory. In addition to Nahua and Maya recollections, contributors examine the indigenous traditions of Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Totonac peoples. Close analysis of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts, and of social and religious rituals, yields insight into community history and memory, political relations, genealogy, ethnic identity, and portrayals of the Spanish invaders. Drawing on archaeology, art history, ethnology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, the essays consider the function of manuscripts and ritual in local, regional, and, now, national settings. Several scholars highlight direct connections between the collective memory of indigenous communities and the struggles of contemporary groups. Such modern documents as land titles, for example, gain legitimacy by referring to ancestral memory. Crossing disciplinary, methodological, and temporal boundaries, Mesoamerican Memory advances our understanding of collective memory in Mexico and Guatemala. Through diverse sources—pictorial and alphabetic, archaeological, archival, and ethnographic—readers gain a glimpse into indigenous remembrances that, without the research exhibited here, might have remained unknown to the outside world.

A unique and wide-ranging introduction to the major prehispanic and colonial societies of Mexico and Central America, featuring new and revised material throughout Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, provides readers with a diverse and well-balanced view of the archaeology of the indigenous societies of Mexico and Central America, helping students better understand key concepts and engage with contemporary debates and issues within the field. The fully updated second edition incorporates contemporary research that reflects new approaches and trends in Mesoamerican archaeology. New and revised chapters from first-time and returning authors cover the archaeology of Mesoamerican cultural history, from the early Gulf Coast Olmec, to the Classic and Postclassic Maya, to the cultures of Oaxaca and Central Mexico before and after colonization. Presenting a wide range of approaches that illustrate political, socio-economic, and symbolic interpretations, this textbook: Encourages students to consider diverse ways of thinking about Mesoamerica: as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice Represents a wide spectrum of perspectives and approaches to Mesoamerican archaeology, including coverage of the Postclassic and Colonial periods Enables readers to think critically about how explanations of the past are produced, verified, and debated Includes accessible introductory material to ensure that students and non-specialists understand the chronological and geographic frameworks of the Mesoamerican tradition Discusses recent developments in the contemporary theory and practice of Mesoamerican archaeology Presents new and original research by a team of internationally recognized contributors Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, is ideal for use in undergraduate courses on the archaeology of Mexico and Central America, as well as for broader courses on the archaeology of the Americas.

In Memory Traces, art historians and archaeologists come together to examine the nature of sacred space in Mesoamerica. Through five well-known and important centers of political power and artistic invention in Mesoamerica—Tetitla at Teotihuacan, Tula Grande, the Mound of the Building Columns at El Tajín, the House of the Phalli at Chichén Itzá, and Tonina—contributors explore the process of recognizing and defining sacred space, how sacred spaces were viewed and used both physically and symbolically, and what theoretical approaches are most useful for art historians and archaeologists seeking to understand these places. Memory Traces acknowledges that the creation, use, abandonment, and reuse of sacred space have a strongly recursive relation to collective memory and meanings linked to the places in question and reconciles issues of continuity and discontinuity of memory in ancient Mesoamerican sacred spaces. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican studies and material culture, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists. Contributors: Laura M. Amrhein, Nicholas P. Dunning, Rex Koontz, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Matthew G. Looper, Travis Nygard, Keith M. Prufer, Matthew H. Robb, Patricia J. Sarro, Kaylee Spencer, Eric Weaver, Linnea Wren

The meanings of ritualized head treatments among ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples is the subject of this book, the first overarching coverage of an important subject. Heads are sources of power that protect, impersonate, emulate sacred forces, distinguish, or acquire identity within the native world. The essays in this book examine these themes in a wide array of indigenous head treatments, including facial cosmetics and hair arrangements, permanent cranial vault and facial modifications, dental decorations, posthumous head processing, and head hunting. They offer new insights into native understandings of beauty, power, age, gender, and ethnicity. The contributors are experts from such diverse fields as skeletal biology, archaeology, aesthetics, forensics, taphonomy, and art history.

This book explores colonial indigenous historical accounts to offer a new interpretation of the origins of Mexico's neo-Aztec patriotic identity.

Bringing the often-neglected topic of migration to the forefront of ancient Mesoamerican studies, this volume uses an illuminating multidisciplinary approach to address the role of population movements in Mexico and Central America from AD 500 to 1500, the tumultuous centuries before European contact. Clarifying what has to date been chiefly speculation, researchers from the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, ethnohistory, and art history delve deeply into the causes and impacts of prehistoric migration in the region. They draw on evidence including records of the Nahuatl language, murals painted at the Cacaxtla polity, ceramics in the style known as Coyotlatelco, skeletal samples from multiple sites, and conquest-era accounts of the origins of the Chichén Itzá Maya from both Native and Spanish scribes. The diverse datasets in this volume help reveal the choices and priorities of migrants during times of political, economic, and social changes that unmoored populations from ancestral lands. Migrations in Late Mesoamerica shows how migration patterns are vitally important to study due to their connection to environmental and political disruption in both ancient societies and today’s world. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies—from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations—and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.