In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that...
In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to...
The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy,...
The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writ...
Winner, Arvey Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2001 Honorable Mention, Honorable Mention, George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, Art Libraries Society of North America, 2001
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...
Winner, Arvey Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2001 Honorable Mention, Honorable Mention, George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, A...
Based on papers presented at the Pre-Columbian Studies Symposium Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America held at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C., on October 11-12, 2008. The fifteen contributors to Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America consider substantive and theoretical issues concerning writing and signing systems in the ancient Americas. They present the latest thinking about these graphic and tactile systems of communication. Their variety of perspectives and their advances in decipherment...
Based on papers presented at the Pre-Columbian Studies Symposium Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America held at Dumbarton Oak...
Arni Brownstone Elizabeth Hill Boone Nicholas Johnson
For centuries, indigenous rulers of Mesoamerica commissioned elaborate pictorial histories to maintain their claims to power, land, and privilege a practice they continued under Spanish authority after the conquest. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec is one such history. An intricate pictographic document on cotton cloth measuring 156 by 66.5 inches, the lienzo was produced by an Indian painter-scribe of great skill during the sixteenth century in the northern Mixteca, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It depicts events dating from the eleventh century to the early years of the Spanish colony. Housed...
For centuries, indigenous rulers of Mesoamerica commissioned elaborate pictorial histories to maintain their claims to power, land, and privilege a pr...
The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writing" of recorded speech. Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy,...
The history of writing, or so the standard story goes, is an ascending process, evolving toward the alphabet and finally culminating in the "full writ...
Boone, Elizabeth Hill; Burkhart, Louise M.; Tavárez, David
Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a seventeenth-century pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico, preserved as Fonds Mexicain 399 at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Works in this genre present the Catholic catechism in pictures that were read sign by sign as aids to memorization and oral performance. They have long been understood as a product of the experimental techniques of early evangelization, but this study shows that they are better understood as indigenous expressions of devotional knowledge.
In addition to inventive pictography...
Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a seventeenth-century pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico, preserv...
