ECLIPSE RECORDS IN A CORPUS OF COLONIAL ZAPOTEC 260-DAY CALENDARS

Abstract

AbstractThis paper translates and analyzes references to eclipses in two seventeenth-century Zapotec calendrical booklets.1These booklets are part of a corpus of 106 separate calendrical texts and four collections of ritual songs that were turned over to ecclesiastical authorities in 1704 and 1705 as part of an ambitious campaign against traditional indigenous ritual practices conducted in the province of Villa Alta in northern Oaxaca. Both of these booklets contain a complete day-by-day representation of the Zapotec 260-day divinatory calendar, with annotations in Zapotec alongside many of these entries. Two such annotations in Booklet 81 explicitly record the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses visible in the Sierra Zapoteca in 1691 and 1693. Annotations in Booklet 63 do not mention eclipses but allude to them by recording the names and Gregorian dates of Christian feasts celebrated on the dates of eclipses in 1686 and 1690; such allusions are otherwise found mainly with the Zapotec dates of the beginnings or ends of significant Zapotec calendrical cycles—the 260-day calendar itself or its 65-day subdivisions, and the start of the Zapotec 365-day year—and so reflect a systematic pattern of engagement by at least one Zapotec calendar specialist with indigenous ritual knowledge and practices. Our analysis suggests that colonial Zapotec calendar specialists monitored and perhaps also anticipated the occurrence of eclipses in terms of the patterns of eclipse recurrence in particular parts of the divinatory calendar.