The Lienzo Of Tlapiltepec

In four chapters, a foreword, preface, and two appendices accompanied by detailed, full-color illustrations, scholars Arni Brownstone, Nicholas Johnson, Bas van Doesburg, Eckehard Dolinski, Michael Swanton, and Elizabeth Hill Boone describe what a lienzo is and how it was made. They also explain the particular origin, format, and content of the Lienzo of Tlapiltepec—as well as its place within the larger world of Mexican painted history. The contributors furthermore explore the artistry and visual experience of the work. A final essay documents past illustrations of the lienzo including the one rendered for this book, which employed innovative processes to recover long faded colors.

The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today. This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos. Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

Time and the Ancestors: Aztec and Mixtec Ritual Art combines iconographical analysis with archaeological, historical and ethnographic studies and offers new interpretations of enigmatic masterpieces from ancient Mexico, focusing specifically on the symbols and values of the religious heritage of indigenous peoples.

In 1981, under the editorship of Victoria Bricker, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest that may not have been included in the original Handbook. This volume is designed to recognize the important role that epigraphy has come to play in Middle American scholarship and to document significant achievements in three areas: dynastic history, phonetic decipherment, and calendrics. The book covers four of the major pre-Columbian scripts in the region (Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya) and one that is relatively unknown (Tlapanec).

This volume is designed to recognize the important role that epigraphy has come to play in Middle American scholarship and to document significant achievements in three areas: dynastic history, phonetic decipherment, and calendrics.

History, especially ancient history, gains reality when it can be related to modern geography. The interplay appears in instances cited throughout this study -- specifically of Mexican geographical identifications that help recover segments of the country's pre-Columbia past. This study's principal aim is to show how a particular identification augments the history that can be extracted from a related group of Mexican pictorial manuscripts, whose historical value, though well recognized, has as yet been little explored. These are the lienzos -- genealogical, historical & geographical documents painted on cloth -- of the Coixtlahuaca Valley in the northern region of the state of Oaxaca known as the Mixteca Alta. Illustrations.