Description
Book Synopsis2023 Best Subsequent Book Native American and Indigenous Studies Association2023 Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Social Sciences Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section2022 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize New England Council of Latin American StudiesAs the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture. In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dom
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Rethinking Time: Zapotec and Nahua Cycles after the Conquest
Chapter 3. Northern Zapotec Writing, Literacy, and Society
Chapter 4. The Shapes of the Universe: Theories of Time and Space
Chapter 5. Deities, Sacred Beings, and Their Feasts
Chapter 6. Singing the Ancestors Back to Earth
Chapter 7. Confronting Christianity: Resistance, Adaptation, Reception
Chapter 8. Conclusions
Appendix. Analytical Translation of Songbooks 100 and 101, and Manual 1, Excerpt
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
