Abstract
Celebrated for scholarly symposia on Pre-Columbian America, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. mobilized a program on time in Mesoamerica and the Andes in the run-up to the 21 December 2012 completion of baktun 13, a calendrically significant interval in the Maya Long Count odometer of time. The world at that time was preoccupied with the meaning of time in the ancient Maya world, and international media routinely spotlighted the dubious claims of self-appointed purveyors of apocalypse.
On the other hand, the 14 articles collected here and edited by symposium organizer Anthony F. Aveni emerged from the presentations by authentic experts in astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and history of science. Varied in focus and approach, these papers broadly belong to studies of astronomy and culture, with an emphasis on time, the calendar, and time-factored enterprises.
According to the dust wrapper, the collection addresses how history was conceived, codified, and preserved in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes, how enterprises—particularly rituals—were timed and why, and what we can know about the indigenous perceptions and applications of time from what these societies left behind.
The book’s title suggests a broad and comprehensive review—a publication that consolidates the basics, demonstrates their operation across a variety of circumstances, shows how they generate shared and divergent responses, and explains why this is so and what it means. In fact, most of the articles are very technical, highly specialized, and directed to a limited and informed audience. The material is detailed, dense, and demanding.
The book opens with Aveni’s accessible and inviting introduction, and once past Richard Landes’s worthy and concept-heavy examination of end times, ordinary times, and chronological precision in the West, the greater part of the book is divided in two. One section is said to examine how time was sensed in Pre-Columbian America, and the other is assigned to the way time was registered in its communities. That distinction is, however, labored and seems designed to ease the reader’s burden with an illusion of structure. The partition doesn’t really tell the reader what is most important about the contributions each section harbors.
For the most part, these inquiries, though substantive and valuable, are narrow. They comprise more of a gathering of specialist inquiries than a synthesis of varied material and fundamental principles. This remains evident in Aveni’s very useful concluding commentary. He highlights interesting elements of the articles but is hard-pressed to identify a singular, unifying perspective from their content.
Documentation and formalization of research are among the primary functions of academic publication, and this assembly of work on the measure and meaning of time in Mesoamerica and the Andes addresses those tasks. The value of each article for each reader will vary with the reader’s specialized interest and knowledge.
The articles range from the highly abstract to the unambiguously concrete. For example, “Ecumene Time, Anecume Time: Proposal and Paradigm” by Alfredo López Austin systematizes most of the fundamentals of Aztec cosmovision and mythic creation in a framework that distinguishes between time of this world and time not of this world. More tangible cultural assets are examined by Stella Nair in “Space and Time in the Architecture of Inca Royal Estates.” Although I’m not convinced the Inca ruler deliberately manipulated architecture and landscape on behalf of an intended perception of time, the hierarchy of power is evident in this deliciously specific analysis of the king’s design of royal estates.
Other topics include time and animate objects for contemporary Tz’utujil Maya ritualists, Classic Maya concepts of time and space, the ceque system of Cuzco, time and the Huarochiri Manuscript, linearity and cyclicity in Maya calendrics, calendrical considerations in Mexican dynastic imagery, world ages in the Andes, time and political emblems in Colonial Peru, and calendars and computers in Mesoamerica and Bali. This is a rich inventory, but it is intended for those working seriously in Mesoamerican and Andean archaeology and anthropology and with interests related to the authors’ priorities. Readers need to come already equipped with the basics and the motivation to penetrate esoteric material. Anyone believing the end of the world was upon us in 2012 and looking for superficial guidance would have been made impatient for the Apocalypse by the intellectual investment this book requires.