Some seventeen hundred years ago in the mountainous western Mexican state of Oaxaca, a culture developed that left us with the rarest of commodities: books. This culture—the Mixtecs—existed in a world defined by mountains, valleys, and caves. Politically, this landscape was divided into a series of very small principalities that in many ways resembled the city-states of Renaissance Italy. The ruling lineages of this group focused on an ideology based on ancestors, marriage alliances, and warfare. The books that the Mixtecs produced were principally devoted to these genealogies and their roles in political legitimization.
Europeans first became aware of these native books, called “codices,” when Hernán Cortés included two of them in his gift of New World curiosities to Emperor Charles V. They were among those items intended to elicit royal interest, delight, and amazement.
Since their introduction into the European academic landscape, these manuscripts have sparked strong interest. Though there have been many attempts at interpretation, the great breakthrough was achieved by Alfonso Caso when, in 1949, he published a definitive argument establishing their Mixtec origins (El Mapa de Teozacoalco, 1998). As Caso’s research progressed, it became apparent that these manuscripts contained historical information. He noted:
The Indians not only of Mexico, but from the whole of Mesoamerica possessed a true historical vocation, and they told and wrote history. (trans. Manuel Aguilar and Claudia Alarcon)
Since Caso’s groundbreaking discoveries there have been many efforts to recover the specifics of Mixtec history as they wrote it. Two of their documents have been resistant to historical, chronological analysis; namely, Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse and Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I obverse. In them, the Mixtec calendar has been both a key and an impediment to the recovery of their historical information. In this volume, Robert Williams has selected these most difficult and obscure Mixtec manuscripts (chiefly Zouche-Nuttall obverse) for his work. Their obscurity rests on the fact that though the codex vignettes obviously describe marriages and warfare between diverse Mixtec elites, the convoluted chronologies associated with them have been unobvious and controversial. Williams, in this important study, shows that the calendar information is far from being merely metaphorical, resting as it does solidly on the Mixtec political need to accurately record alliances, the offspring of royal marriages, and the magical foundation of Mixtec rulership. The process and methodology through which Williams demonstrates this essentially linear historical chronology rests on his elucidation of the ingenious, complex format of Zouche-Nuttall obverse. Once the reader understands that the information revealed through the codex format and contents is a combination of both history in the European sense as well as the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, then Mixtec history comes alive vividly.
With this publication, Robert Williams takes his place among the few academics who are cognizant of the human element in the ancient Mesoamerican past. The rulers of the Mixtecs, like their European counterparts, focused on enhancing their prestige through warfare and carefully crafted marriages. Williams’s linking of these elements of elite behavior with the native calendar reveals aspects of Mixtec history that dwell in myth as well as literal time. This revelation, more than anything else, underlines the often-neglected fact that the Mixtecs were human beings concerned with many of the problems of contemporary humanity. These pages reveal that Mixtec history and ideological views have their counterparts in the history and ideological foundations of all humankind.
F. KENT REILLY III
Department of Anthropology
Texas State University–San Marcos