| Traditional
High Cultures |
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| Oral and Written
Traditions and Rock Art as the Histories of Both Ancient and Living Peoples,
Especially of the Americas before the Arrival of Europeans |
Written History and Geography in Central Mexico -- Codices, Lienzos, and Mapas Linked to the Ground |
| Abstract of session as a whole The session co-chairs are John Pohl (USA) and Søren Wichman (Denmark) Sessions scheduled for 22 June, 9:00 to 11:00 and 11:30 to 1:00 |
Often regarded as pictorial, the linearly read codices can be minimally read as particular written languages. This may also be true, more than we have known, of the glyphic elements in the more geographical Mapas and Lienzos, and in Aztec documents. These histories and geographies stretch from north of Mexico City to the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, and substantial histories begin at least before 900. A major purpose of this session is to make it clear just how reliable they are, and as much as possible, specific implications they have for doing archaeology. For the wide range of written traditions in these areas, the following two books and their references are very useful: Writing Without Words, ed. by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo. Duke University Press 1994. and Stories in Red and Black, ed. by Elizabeth Hill Boone. University of Texas Press 2000. |
| Landscape, Performance, and History in the Mixtec Codices by John M. D. Pohl Ph.D, Research Associate, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA [Dr. Pohl will be unable to be contribute a presentation to this session.] |
Between A.D. 1200 and 1521, the Mixtec civilization of Oaxaca created masterpieces of art in the form of screen fold books called codices. In deciphering the pictographic story panels, scholars determined that the Mixtec codices recorded heroic stories and royal genealogies dating from the 10th through the 16th centuries, making them the longest continuous American Indian history ever recorded. Yet, despite our perception of the codices as fundamentally historical documents, there is increasing evidence that they also encoded a system of moveable feasts and markets held in surrounding wilderness areas where the mummified remains of the ancestors portrayed in the codices were buried in caves and other natural features. I will examine how the codices were thereby employed by nobles to reenact in highly theatrical ways the epic sagas on the actual locations where the historical events were thought to take place. |
| Mixtec Historical Codices as Written Language
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The Mixtec codices are the most obviously historical of Mexico. They span at least from the late 800's CE to the 1700's, with largely continuous descent of ruling lineages at named places whose geographical locations are in large degree known. They manifest what is clearly in part written language, something more than a set of pictorial mnemonics from which a narrator would freely spin a story. A minimal reading is possible, just as it is for English, one which does not elaborate beyond what is written. There are occasional rebus puns showing that the language of a particular town was intended. Different Mixtec languages use essentially the same word order and grammar, so the iconographic text can usually be read in any of them. That was one of the genius features of this writing. Beyond the red guidelines which dictate reading order of scenes, there is usually a strict reading order within scenes. Sometimes this order even disambiguates a calendric day sign, telling us whether it is actually a date, or the name of a person, or associated with a place (perhaps recalling the foundation of that place or some other significant event there). It may be possible to distinguish main clauses from subordinate clauses having the same propositional content. |
| When They Were Kings: cartography, history, and people of southeastern Oaxaca by Danny Zborover, Dept. Of Archaeology, University of Calgary |
The southeastern Oaxacan coast and highlands was until recently a terra incognita both archaeologically and ethnohistorically. One of the main sources for the region is the Lienzo de Tecciztlan y Tequatepec, a cartographic-history depicting early Colonial peer polity interaction and factional competition, involving at least three cacicazgos and four different ethnic groups. Based on this and several other little-known documents from the region, we can reconstruct narratives through their spatial composition. Whereas the mythic-historical content was transmitted both pictorially and orally, the cartographic content (particularly the topoglyphs) also incorporated phonetic elements. These pictographic documents were particularly suitable for this polyglot region and period of political upheaval, as they served as tools of ethnic cohesion and elite propaganda. Some archaeological applications and implications for the contemporary Chontal people who inhabit the region will also be discussed. |
| The Political Geography of the Mixteca-Tlapaneca-Nahuatl Region of Eastern Guerrero according to the Codices of Azoyú and the Palimpsest of Veinte Mazorcas by Gerardo Gutierrez |
Tlapa-Tlachinollan was a middle size polity located in eastern Guerrero.
Information on its indigenous political history is available from the
codices of Azoyú 1 and 2 which record its political history from
A.D. 1300 to A.D. 1565. These documents depict the place names of a
number of defeated rival polities and the approximate date they were
conquered or annexed by Tlapa-Tlachinollan. Through field research,
these place names have been associated with Postclassic archaeological
sites in eastern Guerrero, which provides a historical and geographic
framework to reconstruct the dynamics of political interaction in that
region. |
| El idioma mixteco y su uso en el pueblo de Apoala: Sa´vi "Lenguaje Ceremonial" [The language which is used to read the Mixtec codices is a ceremonial language quite distinct from everyday language. This presentation will be in Spanish.] by Maestro Ubaldo López García, Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, México |
Pocas veces se ha hablado de la forma en que los hablantes del idioma mixteco usan su lengua, por lo que en esta reunión quiero dar a conocer los resultados de mi investigación, del análisis que he hecho de ésta y a los resultados que he llegado como hablante. Quiero destacar que ésta tiene dos usos; a uno le he llamado "lenguaje cotidiano", por que es de dominio de todos los hablantes, es la que aprendemos desde que nacemos hasta que nos morimos; la otra forma de hablar de esta lengua le he denominado "lenguaje ceremonial", le he llamado así porque es un lenguaje muy especializado que se usa solamente en las diferentes ceremonias, con una estructura muy contrastiva, poética, metafórica, con contenido filosófico, por lo mismo, esta está reservado a un grupo de personas ancianas, que desempeñaron muchas cargos en el pueblo y durante ese servicio aprendieron esa forma de hablar, de ahí que es importante conocer su uso, su estructura y su contenido. Se hablará del sistema de cargo donde se forman los especialistas para hablar el lenguaje ceremonial, se hará mencion de los diferentes eventos donde ellos intervienen con ese lenguaje,así como un ejemplo del discurso para ver su estructura. Así mismo se verá el Bastón de Mando precolonial, un símbolo muy significativo entre los pueblos indígenas de Oaxaca, así como de otros, pero que no se sabe su origen; aquí presentaré un cuadro simbólico que se conserva en el pueblo de Apoala, de cual los oradores se inspiran para revelar su contenido, en base a esos discursos he encontrado mucha relación entre el cuadro de Apoala y el Bastón que utilizaron los antepasados, así como la formación de las autoridades cuando portan el Bastón; todo esto es lo que he encontrado como relación contenido en los libros sagrados de los mixtecos antiguos. |
| Writing in a multilingual community. The case of the Coixtlahuaca lienzos. by Sebastiaan van Doesburg, Burgoa Library, Oaxaca City, Mexico |
Within the famous pictographic heritage of the Mixteca (Oaxaca),
the lienzos or painted cloths from the Coixtlahuaca valley were identified
as a separate group of documents due to the differences in content with
the better known Mixtec codices. The preference of the Coixtlahuaca
tlacuilos to represent historical records in a cartographic format and
the relatively limited extent of the region depicted has been very helpful
in the decipherment |
| The Historicity of the Map of Cuauhtinchan
#2 and |
Man-made caves are particularly interesting because their form and placement
are the result of conscious human decisions rather than the whim of nature.
Where the form is elaborate, the original intent and message can often
be read with little ambiguity. The interpretation of elaborate examples
can then be used to illuminate the meaning of other caves. This paper
documents seven artificial caves that had been excavated into an escarpment
below the site of Acatzingo Viejo. The close formal similarity of the
complex to representations in codices such as the Vaticanus A leaves little
doubt as to the original intent. The study of these caves provided an opportunity to demonstrate the historical character of the Map of Cuauhtinchan No. 2 which had been drawn in the area. It was possible to observe from the top of Cerro Tlaxcanyo, next to the town of Tepeaca, that the region delimited by the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl to the west, the Malinche Volcano to the north, the Pico de Orizaba to the east and the Sierra Tentzon to the south, had been faithfully rendered by the indigenous artist. Relative position of landmarks is depicted with exactness while there is greater imprecision in scale, as the cartographer manipulated distances to fit the important features into a rectangular format. The map was made in the sixteenth century with the purpose of legitimizing land claims against the confusions and dispossessions created first by Aztec domination and later by the Spanish Conquest. It also presents an historical account of the Toltec-Chichimec migrations and their settlement in the towns of the Valley of Puebla. During the mapping of Acatzingo Viejo, it was possible to establish the geographic location of a group of caves that appear in the Map of Cuauhtinchan No. 2. |
| Writing the Land: Migration and Memory in Post-Conquest
Cuauhtinchan [Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca] by Dana Leibsohn. Art Department, Smith College |
In the first decades after the Spanish conquest, in many communities
across central Mexico, indigenous people re-made their histories. New
kinds of records were fashioned by combining pictorial images with pre-Hispanic-style
glyphs and alphabetic texts. These documents -- be they lienzos, codices,
or sheaves of paper -- recast the past in order to better address the
needs of the post-conquest present. While a wealth of local detail surfaces
in these documents, narratives of ancestral migration seem to have had
particular importance. See also her book in preparation, Of time Immemorial: Writing,
Painting, and |
| Inter-Regional Scribal Discourse between the Maya and the Mixteca-Puebla: Evidence from the Madrid Codex
by Bryan R. Just, Tulane University |
This paper addresses questions of inter-regional scribal interaction through a consideration of four almanacs in the Maya Madrid codex that share structural affinities with the in extenso format known from Mixteca-Puebla, or Borgia Group, codices. Various aspects of these almanacs reveal that the integration of this non-Maya format was a novel and challenging project for the Madrid’s scribes. Further, structural features of these almanacs suggest a specific function that was likely the rationale for their inclusion in the manuscript. The discussion of these almanacs will elucidate two ways in which we can productively interpret notational ‘errors’ evident in them: (1) as symptoms of the novel integration of a non-Maya notational system; and (2) as deviations from standard conventions meant to signal correlations to other sections of the manuscript. This second class of ‘error,’ in conjunction with the structural and positional relations among almanacs and the physical character of the Madrid codex itself, will be shown to facilitate the coordination of information on the opposing sides of the manuscript. Some broader socio-cultural implications of this inter-regional esoteric interaction will be considered in concluding. |
| Regional scribal traditions: Methodological
Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing |
After a century of research, Nahuatl writing is not yet completely deciphered. One reason is an artificial neglect of some hieroglyphic texts, imposed by the scholarly tradition. An important group of documents, including the Codex Santa María Asunción and the Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaoztoc, have traditionally been taken not to be representative of the pre-Columbian writing system. Since they exhibit a more frequent use of phonetic compounds in comparison with other documents like the Codex Mendoza or the Matricula de Tributos, they have been considered to be influenced by the alphabetic writing system brought by the Spaniards. I justify the full use of this group of documents, arguing that the higher frequency of phoneticism is not a consequence of a Spanish influence at all but an idiosyncratic characteristic of the Texcocan scribal school from which they come. The tlaquiloque of Texcoco in many cases favored more phonetically transparent spellings, but these scribes used exactly the same spelling rules and orthographic conventions as the tlaquioloque belonging to other contemporary scribal schools. There is here an analogy with neighboring Maya writing, where the differences between different regional scribal schools have never been interpreted as evidence for the existence of different writing systems. Thus, for example, during the Terminal Classic the scribes of the Chichen Itza region also favored a more frequent usage of syllabic signs in glyphic compounds. This peculiarity, rather than being looked upon as problematical or as evidence that the inscriptions of the site somehow do not relate directly to the rest of the corpus of Classic inscriptions, has been taken advantage of in successful decipherments of several signs. For a methodologically more correct approach to Nahuatl writing, it is important to incorporate the documents of the Texcocan school into the corpus of Nahuatl hieroglyphic texts, using them in the process of decipherment. When we consider the script as a whole and the corpus in its totality, we will be able to complete the decipherment and systematization of Nahuatl writing. |
| The Earliest Interpretations of Aztec Pictorial
Manuscripts: from Glyphs to Glosses |
Lacadena's theory of the Nahuatl writing system as a morphosyllabic script has important consequences for the linguistic and historical interpretations of the codices. The discovery that the script is more phonologically transparent than previously thought relegates the glosses to a status as secondary sources, as interpretations of the glyphic messages rather than as direct equivalents. There are in fact often discrepancies between the glyphs and the glosses, and we are interested in explanations for these discrepancies. It is now possible to say something about the the linguistic affinities of Nahuatl codices and of their earliest interpreters, the people who glossed the codices for the Spaniards. Although internal differences among Nahuatl dialects are slight, some seem to be reflected in the codices. For example, the name glyph of the ruler known from chronicles written by Spaniards as "Tizoc" is customarily written glyphically as /tesok/. The discrepancy in the vowel is unlikely to be due to a polyvalency in the glyph for the syllable /te/, since an i/e dialectal variation is actually expected in the particular phonological environment constituted by a /t/ and an /s/. In this environment there is a split among the front vowels such that a Western Nahuatl /i/ corresponds to an Eastern Nahuatl /e/ (Dakin and Canger 1985). Given the demonstration of Canger (1988) that Western Nahuatl is the dialect of the "Aztecs" or Mexica, who arrived relatively late to the Tenochtitlan area, and that Eastern Nahuatl is the older speech of the region (according to Dakin and Wichmann 2000 perhaps even representing the dominant language of Teotihuacan), it is interesting to find that this discrepancy between the–presumably more conservative–glyphs and their–obviously more recent–glosses corresponds to the Eastern vs. Western split. Our understanding of the Nahuatl codices as having phonetic writing thus entails new methodologies in investigating writing, linguistics, history, and other fields. |
| The Extent of Writing to the North and Brief Overview by Lloyd Anderson, Ecological Linguistics [note: this presentation is available in case another presentation has to be dropped or in case there is time before the end of the session] Email Lloyd Anderson |
Parts of the written symbolism of Mesoamerica, four-directional concepts in refoundations and new beginnings, are found among the Huichol, Navajo, and Mississippian cultures to the north. Several correspondences show that there must have been some kind of cultural links, most probably in the postclassic (less probably, inherited from earlier). There is even the possibility that a Spiro shell engraving intended to record four times 13 equals a cycle of 52. Concluding remarks touch on the enormous range of written and mapped history and geography; adventures for future investigations, and affirmation of indigenous traditions. |