Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca

Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca
Author: Robert Lloyd Williams
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292774036

In the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world, histories and collections of ritual knowledge were often presented in the form of painted and folded books now known as codices, and the knowledge itself was encoded into pictographs. Eight codices have survived from the Mixtec peoples of ancient Oaxaca, Mexico; a part of one of them, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, is the subject of this book. As a group, the Mixtec codices contain the longest detailed histories and royal genealogies known for any indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall offers a unique window into how the Mixtecs themselves viewed their social and political cosmos without the bias of western European interpretation. At the same time, however, the complex calendrical information recorded in the Zouche-Nuttall has made it resistant to historical, chronological analysis, thereby rendering its narrative obscure. In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935–1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices.

Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca

Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca
Author: Robert Lloyd Williams
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2009-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292721218

"In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935-1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures, including Lady Six Monkey of Jaltepec, Lord Two Rain Twenty Jaguars of Tilantongo, and Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices."--BOOK JACKET.

The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall

The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall
Author: Robert Lloyd Williams
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780292744387

The pre-Hispanic Mixtec people of Mexico recorded political and religious history, including the biographies and genealogies of their rulers, in pictograms on hand-painted, screen-fold manuscripts known as codices. Functioning rather like movie production storyboards, the codices served as outlines of oral traditions to stimulate the memories of bards who knew the complete narratives, which were sung, danced, and performed at elite functions. Centuries later we have limited access to those original performances, and all that remains for our codex interpretation is what is painted on the pages—perhaps five to ten percent of their memory-encoded information. Continuing the pioneering interpretation he began in Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca, Robert Lloyd Williams offers an authoritative guide to the entire contents of the codex in The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall. Although the reverse document (pages 42–84) has been described in previous literature, the obverse document (pages 1–41) has not been, and it has remained elusive as to narrative. The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall elucidates the three sections of the codex, defines them as to function and content, and provides interpretive and descriptive essays about the Native American history the codex recorded prior to the arrival of Europeans in Mexico and the New World generally. With a full-color reproduction of the entire Codex Zouche-Nuttall and Williams’s expert guidance in unlocking its narrative strategies and structures, The Complete Codex Zouche-Nuttall opens an essential window into the Mixtec social and political cosmos.

The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts

The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts
Author: Maarten Jansen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2010-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004193588

This handbook surveys and describes the illustrated Mixtec manuscripts that survive in Europe, the United States and Mexico.

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology
Author: Deborah L. Nichols
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 996
Release: 2012-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199996342

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 by 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.

The Jaguar Within

The Jaguar Within
Author: Rebecca Stone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292726260

Shamanism—the practice of entering a trance state to experience visions of a reality beyond the ordinary and to gain esoteric knowledge—has been an important part of life for indigenous societies throughout the Americas from prehistoric times until the present. Much has been written about shamanism in both scholarly and popular literature, but few authors have linked it to another significant visual realm—art. In this pioneering study, Rebecca R. Stone considers how deep familiarity with, and profound respect for, the extra-ordinary visionary experiences of shamanism profoundly affected the artistic output of indigenous cultures in Central and South America before the European invasions of the sixteenth century. Using ethnographic accounts of shamanic trance experiences, Stone defines a core set of trance vision characteristics, including enhanced senses, ego dissolution, bodily distortions, flying, spinning and undulating sensations, synaesthesia, and physical transformation from the human self into animal and other states of being. Stone then traces these visionary characteristics in ancient artworks from Costa Rica and Peru. She makes a convincing case that these works, especially those of the Moche, depict shamans in a trance state or else convey the perceptual experience of visions by creating deliberately chaotic and distorted conglomerations of partial, inverted, and incoherent images.

The Mixtecs of Oaxaca

The Mixtecs of Oaxaca
Author: Ronald Spores
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806150890

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky—both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization—synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present. The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world’s most impressive civilizations, antecedent to—and equivalent to—those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a “convergent methodology,” the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs’ multiple transformations over three millennia.

Mississippian Culture Heroes, Ritual Regalia, and Sacred Bundles

Mississippian Culture Heroes, Ritual Regalia, and Sacred Bundles
Author: David H. Dye
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793650608

In Mississippian Culture Heroes, Ritual Regalia, and Sacred Bundles, archaeologists analyze evidence of the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Mississippian people through the lens of indigenous ontologies and material culture. Employing archaeological, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric evidence, the contributors explore the recent emphasis on iconography as an important component for interpreting eastern North America’s ancient past. The research in this volume emphasizes the animistic nature of animals and objects, erasing the false divide between people and other-than-human beings. Drawing on an array of empirical approaches, the contributors demonstrate the importance of understanding beliefs and ritual and the significance of investigating how people in the past practiced religion and ritual by crafting, circulating, using, and ultimately decommissioning material items and spaces, including ceramic effigies, rock art, sacred bundles, shell gorgets, stone figurines, and symbolic weaponry.

Pre-Columbian Foodways

Pre-Columbian Foodways
Author: John Staller
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 691
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1441904719

The significance of food and feasting to Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures has been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and art historians. Foodways studies have been critical to our understanding of early agriculture, political economies, and the domestication and management of plants and animals. Scholars from diverse fields have explored the symbolic complexity of food and its preparation, as well as the social importance of feasting in contemporary and historical societies. This book unites these disciplinary perspectives — from the social and biological sciences to art history and epigraphy — creating a work comprehensive in scope, which reveals our increasing understanding of the various roles of foods and cuisines in Mesoamerican cultures. The volume is organized thematically into three sections. Part 1 gives an overview of food and feasting practices as well as ancient economies in Mesoamerica. Part 2 details ethnographic, epigraphic and isotopic evidence of these practices. Finally, Part 3 presents the metaphoric value of food in Mesoamerican symbolism, ritual, and mythology. The resulting volume provides a thorough, interdisciplinary resource for understanding, food, feasting, and cultural practices in Mesoamerica.

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History
Author: Tatiana Flores
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 822
Release: 2023-11-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000969991

This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.