Historiography and Historical Thought: Indigenous Cultures in the Americas

Abstract

History is here conceived as information transferred by organized human groups. Oral, figural and written channels of transmission are considered. Two writing systems prevailed in precolonial America: the fully developed syllabic Maya script and picture writing of other American peoples. In Mesoamerikcan historical traditions, the focus of the article, discrete ordered entities (persons, places, events) are arranged in cycles on the basis of astronomical and augural calendars. Analogy, reification and cyclic rearrangements are the means by which historical constructs are created. Theogony myths of creation of successive world ages are major topics. Deities are the protagonists of remote ages, tribes and their leaders, places of origin and stations of tribal migrations are added for semi- and full historical times. Reflections on history are not explicit, but can be deduced in part from historical writing: the human fate is overwhelmingly a world of suffering and danger, predetermined by deities and only to a very small degree influenced by individual behavior. Ancient cultures are studied by their successors through artifactual, architectural and artistic remains and these ancient cultures are conceived as more or less mythical according to their historical remoteness. Public monuments, vase painting and manuscripts are the major media of historical writing and figural representation preserved from precolonial times. During the colonial period documents written in the Latin alphabet create syntheses of oral and written information although based on ancient traditions they follow a European style of presentation. Since written and pictorial records are quite meager in content only holistic approaches integrating all sources of information will lead to rich and meaningful reconstructions of history or certain specialized fields, as of chronologies and political systems, since information for these is more abundant in pre- as well as post-conquest documents.