Pipil Writing: An Archaeology of Prototypes and a Political Economy of Literacy (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America (edited by Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim), 2018
This chapter is about the communitarian writing traditions that flourished before Mexican independence. It looks at the role of indigenous language writing in one of the linguistically most diverse areas of Oaxaca, the Coixtlahuaca basin and the adjacent Teotongo valley, where Chocho (Ngiwa), Mixtec (Tu’un Savi), and Nahuatl were all spoken and written simultaneously during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, producing a unique multilingual documentary record. The chapter focusses on the social and political role of writing in indigenous languages, the change from one writing system to the other, the eventual hierarchy among the languages and writing systems, and the resulting choice of language and writing system.
Anthropology 1170: Mesoamerican Writing Systems
This seminar explores the role of writing broadly defined in the social, political, and religious fabric of ancient civilizations of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The region, known as Mesoamerica, is characterized by an amazing variety of indigenous writing systems, from phonetic ones like Maya hieroglyphs, to largely pictographic notations such as Mixtec records. The course offers a survey of Mesoamerican writing systems that centers on the basic properties of the scripts and their uses. It highlights how specific features of Mesoamerican writing systems reflect broader regional traditions with respect to the role of writing in social, political, and religious life of ancient societies. The history of the study of writing systems in Mesoamerica is also brought into view with a particular emphasis on current discussions and recent advancements in our understanding of the indigenous scripts. The course combines lectures with seminar-style discussions, as well as some hands-on exploration of Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial texts on different media from the collections of the Peabody Museum and Harvard libraries.
Indigenous Writing and Literacy in Colonial Mexico
Ucla Historical Journal, 1992
Ma quimatican Yn quexquichtin quitasque yhuan quipohuasque Ynin esCritura de Benta ticchihua Yn tehuantin... Let those know who should see and read this instrument of sale made by us... cin ualic u >ibtabal in testamento tu tanil in yum Batab y_ Justicias... I state my will for it to be written down before the batab and magistrates... yodzanacahui tutu yaha dzaha nudzahui... Let this document in the "Mixtec" language be read...Πntroduction to Indigenous Writing Soon after the arrival of Europeans in the land that they called New Spain, Franciscan and Dominican friars taught the art of alphabetic writing to members of the indigenous elite. As a result, indigenous peoples during the colonial Mexican period produced (mostly legal) documentation in their own languages using the Roman alphabet. The first group to do this were the Nahuas (sometimes called "Aztecs") of central Mexico; material in Nahuatl has survived in greater quantities than sources from other Indigenous Writing and Literacy 9 language-groups and has been studied far more by scholars. dditional work has also been published on Yucatec Maya and Cakchiquel sources and, more recently, on Mixtec documentation. There are also sources, known of but unstudied by scholars, in Zapotec, Chocho, Quiche, Otomi, Tarascan and no doubt other Mesoamerican languages.-^Smaller bodies of documents that have not surfaced or survived may have been written in lesser-spoken languages (see Figure 1: Map of Mesoamerican Languages). This chapter makes general remarks about indigenous-language documentation of colonial Mexico, but our specific comments refer only to the sources with which we are familiar-those in Nahuatl, Mixtec and (Yucatec) Maya. Our concern is to draw attention to the existence of these sources, to the ethnohistorical work in which they have been utilized, and to the potential this material holds for future study. In discussing the characteristics of indigenous sources in three different languages, we are hereby contributing a comparative framework that has yet to receive adequate attention, as well as working towards the disintegration of the term "Indian"~found by ethnohistorians to be increasingly inaccurate and unhelpful, save in its reflection of the Spaniards' racial per
Fuentes MesoAmericanas, Vol. 7, Verlag Anton Saurwein, 2020
Order at: https://mexicon.de/product/fuentes-mesoamericanas-7-2020/ The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is one of the most beautiful Aztec manuscripts from the early colonial period of Mexico. The first half of this codex relates to the Aztecan calendar system, whereas the second one is a detailed account of Aztec history, spanning a time from the beginning of the mythical migration of the Mexica in the eleventh century to the early colonial period in the mid-sixteenth century, including such far-reaching events as the foundation of Tenochtitlan, the war against Tlatelolco, and the conquest of Tenochtitlan led by Hernán Cortés in the years 1519–1521. This eventful history was recorded in a native writing system that can be described as a sophisticated composition of iconography, calendar notation, and such signs that are linked to the language of the Aztecs: Nahuatl. Even though the original Nahuatl text is accompanied by Spanish annotations written in Latin letters, many of the Nahuatl writing signs hitherto remained undeciphered. The first part of the present volume addresses the principles of this exceptional writing system. The second part is a meticulous study of the historical section, presenting numerous new decipherment proposals for yet uninterpreted or misinterpreted signs. The study is topped off with three catalogs, each printed in color: a catalog of the Nahuatl writing signs appearing in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis including their proposed reading, and two catalogs of the deciphered place signsa and the name signs of the depicted historical figures, respectively.
Ethnohistory, 2001
This article analyzes the complex and sometimes deceiving relationship that might exist between the pictographic text and toponymic glosses in Oaxacan screenfolds from the sixteenth century. The case of the Codex Porfirio Díaz shows that these glosses represent not only boundaries of the cacicazgo of Tutepetongo but also lands and subject settlements within the cacicazgo. Despite their apparent relationship to the glyphs, the glosses do not translate the pictographic text. On the contrary, they reflect important changes in the indigenous conception of the cacicazgo.
Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books
Navarrete Linares, Federico, “Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books”, en Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America, E. Boone & G. Urton, eds., Cambridge, Dumbarton Oaks- Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 175-196.