The Creation of a Hall Dedicated to the Sami People at the Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo in Mexico City

Yet Another History of History Mark Thurner (bio) La Historia y Los Historiadores en el Perú. By Manuel Burga . (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2005. Pp. 237) How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra . (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 450. $55.00 cloth.) Historia de las Historias de la Nación Mexicana. By Enrique Florescano . (Mexico City: Taurus, 2002. Pp. 530.) Construcción de las Identidades Latinoamericanas: Ensayos de Historia Intelectual, Siglos XIX–XX. Edited by Aimer Granados and Carlos Marichal . (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2004. Pp. 269.) La Presencia del Pasado. By Enrique Krauze . (Mexico City: Bancomer, 2004. Pp. 495.) Los Pinceles de la Historia. By the Museo Nacional de Arte de México. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000-2003. 4 volumes.) La Nación Como Problema: Los Historiadores y la ‘Cuestión Nacional.’By Elías José Palti . (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003. Pp. 157.) La Cultura Moderna de la Historia: Una Aproximación Teórica e Historiográfica. By Guillermo Zermeño Padilla . (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2002. Pp. 246) La tarea verdadera consiste ante todo en examinar los orígenes, los perjuicios y los procesos de las verdades recibidas. En una palabra, hacer cuestión expresa de la historia de la historia. 1 —Edmundo O'Gorman (1947) [End Page 164] In the last five years or so a reflexive history of history has begun to take shape in the nations of, or at any rate in some relation to, that grand subject-object of modern history named "Latin America." In a word, this history takes its object of study to be the productions and production of history itself. For some of its practitioners this newer history of history is closely linked to "the new intellectual history." That history, which began to appear in the Latin American field in the 1990s, is not merely a history of what intellectuals have written and thought in the past; it is a history that isitself intellectual in the best sense of the term. To hijack Dominick La Capra's witty remarks on the significance for European intellectual history of Hayden White's critical opus, one might say without undue hyperbole that this newer history of history is reopening the possibility of thought in Latin American history. 2 This is so because in revisiting the ways in which Latin American histories have been researched, written, and read the newer history of history both retraces and—knowingly or not—questions the epistemological foundations and realist regimes of representation that underwrite contemporary understandings of Latin American pasts. That is, the newer history of history, like the new intellectual history, is often reflexive: its subject-object and limits of inquiry are its own tropos. As a turning inward that, in one way or another, responds to a general crisis of history, it seeks to get to the bottom of its own practice and knowledge. What is perhaps most exciting—and intellectually challenging—about this new work is that those received limits (its bottom) now appear to be much less constraining (deeper, wider) than was previously thought. Not so long ago it was dreamed—under the somnic trance of liberal, dependency, and Marxian mantras—that this part of the world had no intellectual history worth thinking and writing about. It was at most a "tragic story": in the first instance, of colonial derivations in the "Scholastic" mode; and in the second (that is, after Independence), of "aping Europe." "Intellectual history," if it could be said to exist, was a province of Europe, not Iberian America. Such dismissals now appear quaint, if not "tragic." The newer history of history in this part of the world now brims with surprises. And yet it is also something of a hall of mirrors, a haunted house of whispering voices, and its historians invite us to linger in its labyrinthine corridors. This is not to say that the kind of writing under review here (by no means an exhaustive sample of recent work...

In 1956 the iconoclastic Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas published his article “La cortina de nopal” (“The Cactus Curtain”), famously satirizing all forms of postrevolutionary official dogmatism including social realist painting. Cuevas’s parable follows Juan, an artist curious about international art-world currents who buckles under art-world conformism to become an ardent purveyor of the clichés—thematic and stylistic—of Mexican-school painting. Through Juan, Cuevas renders explicit the links between postrevolutionary nationalism and politics. Crucially, he also thematizes the limits of official culture: he recounts that Juan’s working-class family had never even seen a mural and if they had they expressed “appreciation” by defacing Mexico’s hallowed painted walls. Yet according to Cuevas, Juan and his peers hypocritically embraced postrevolutionary culture, including “golden age” films but also crime tabloids, radio melodramas, boxing, and industrial consumer goods that flooded the Mexican market in the 1940s. Cuevas was the paragon of the 1950s Ruptura generation who declared war against art-world officialdom, and the polemical tone and imagery of “The Cactus Curtain” serves to obscure the heterogeneity of Mexico City’s rebel generation.Mary Kay Vaughan’s biography of the painter Pepe Zuñiga is a masterful corrective not just to Cuevas’s amusing bombast but also to overdetermined accounts that work backward from the events of 1968 to focus solely on the negative effects of the collapse of the Mexican miracle. Zuñiga and his cohort, many of them hailing from the working class satirized by Cuevas, have been forgotten because they were “sandwiched” between the affluent and better known iconoclastic Ruptura artists and the post-1968 radicalized collectives known as “los grupos” (216–18). In her richly historicized account Vaughan gives complexity to Zuñiga’s coming of age during Mexico’s opportunity moment.Zuñiga’s family migrated from Oaxaca City to Mexico City’s Colonia Guerrero in 1943. There they gradually acquired the social capital that urban denizens enjoyed as a result of Mexico’s World War II–era prosperity. Vaughan offers a textured account of the minimal impact of postrevolutionary dogma on the Zuñiga family, whose upward mobility was highly individualized yet enabled by political stability, economic growth, and state investment. As Vaughan shows, Pepe’s experience intersects with a generalizable understanding of the burgeoning “humanist cosmopolitanism” (147) of Mexico’s rebel generation. Vaughan’s analysis unfolds across ten chapters that range in focus from Pepe’s parent’s individual stories to his adolescence and education at La Esmeralda art school; a chapter on the affirmative value of Pepe’s participation in the creation of exhibits at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología; and chapters that examine his experience of the struggles of 1968, his success in Europe in the 1970s, and how life in Colonia Guerrero changed after the 1985 earthquake.Vaughan grounds her analysis in four intersecting processes that forged in Zuñiga and many in his cohort a hopeful, “freedom-seeking, affective subjectivity” (212) significantly different from the “corporatism” of the postrevolutionary era (51). The first process, the “mobilization for children” resulted from state investment in public education and child welfare (9). Thus “healthy, productive, disciplined workers and their consuming families” were nurtured, as was the notion that children had the right to be happy and free from privation. The second was mass entertainment—from radio programs and films to lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) and primary school textbooks. This facilitated the “formation of a more critical and demanding subjectivity and a new notion of rights” (13). The third entails the “feminization of male sensibility” (17) that inspired youth to critique oppressive patriarchy and in Pepe’s case, enabled him to express tenderness in his painted nudes, female and male, such that “sexuality [is] shorn of objectification and abjection” (224). The fourth culminating process was a “critical public of youth” (22) that rose up to challenge the state and then demand a more democratic public sphere post-1968 (205).Zuñiga may not be the best-known artist to emerge from the long 1960s but Vaughan’s analysis will surely draw attention to his oeuvre. Along the way she reveals midcentury Mexico City to be as much a place of growing prosperity, of vibrant public culture, and of idealistic and rebellious youth culture as of frustration with official dogmatism, economic hardship, betrayal, and outright repression.

Caterina Pizzigoni and Camilla Townsend's translation of a set of Nahuatl-language documents represents the 16th volume in Latin American Originals, a series edited by Matthew Restall that presents translations of primary source texts with specialist scholarly apparatus. Colonial-era wills and other forms of mundane documents have long provided scholars a rich source of material to study Indigenous history, notably in the groundbreaking work of the late James Lockhart. The materials in Pizzigoni and Townsend's Indigenous Life after the Conquest are distinctive in this tradition because the records belonged to a single family and were maintained by that family over centuries. As Pizzigoni and Townsend explain in their introduction, the de la Cruz family from the Toluca Valley were elite but not noble. They were the sort of family whose wealth and status grew in the colonial period, much to the chagrin of Indigenous families descendant from the great tlatoque who ruled over central Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. The core set of de la Cruz documents was initially identified by Lockhart in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. He shared transcriptions of the materials with Pizzigoni, who in turn located additional records related to the family in various archives. In this slim volume, Pizzigoni and Townsend present translations of five of these documents accompanied by a robust introduction that provides insight into the multiple generations of family members who produced them.The lengthiest of the texts, the first document is titled “The de la Cruz Family Record Book,” and it, unlike the remaining four documents, is presented initially in Nahuatl as transcribed from the manuscript and then in English translation. Don Pedro de la Cruz began the book in 1647 to keep records of donations he made to local churches. A decade later, around the time that don Pedro assumed the role of gobernador of the altepetl of Tepemaxalco, the book evolved to become a repository of other events related to his community, in the tradition of Nahua historical annals, or xiuhpohualli. This book would be maintained by the family until the nineteenth century. The final entry is in the year 1842, decades after Mexican independence. The document provides an extraordinary window on the daily lived experiences of Nahua elite families during the colonial period. We find records of financial accounts and labor tribute, descriptions of harvests and building projects including evolving repairs and additions to the church, and entries detailing the specific positions that individuals in the community held. The notations are remarkable for the precision with which they capture daily life in an Indigenous community, as the authors recorded events they deemed significant, ranging from an eclipse to the donation of a bell to the church and the purchase of chickens used to entertain guests from Mexico City. The quotidian becomes noteworthy through its sheer consistency and duration.Document 2 provides records for the year 1658 from a tribute roll maintained by don Pedro de la Cruz during his first eight years as governor of Tepemaxalco, from 1657 to 1665. In addition to alphabetic notations of monetary tribute, the document contains a duplicate accounting in non-European pictoglyphic notations that show contributions from each tlaxilacalli, or subdistrict of the altepetl. Document 3 provides the seventeenth-century birth records of members of the de la Cruz family found in the Archivo Parroquial de San Pedro y San Pablo in Calimaya, Mexico. Document 4 is the will of don Pedro de la Cruz, dated 1667, while document 5 is the will of his son-in-law don Juan de la Cruz, dated 1691. Don Juan's will was written with care over a period of time and reflects with great consideration how his assets should be distributed and how his death should be remembered in his church and community. This final document is followed by several brief scholarly supplements, including an epilogue, a note on language and orthography, and a glossary.Renowned experts, Pizzigoni and Townsend bring their knowledge of colonial Nahuatl as well as Nahua cultural and social history to these unique sources. The ancillary materials situate the corpus of colonial-era manuscript records for the reader, while the documents themselves provide a rich depiction of daily life for the de la Cruz family, an Indigenous family whose members held leadership positions in their local community over the course of centuries. In this way, these records attest to the survival and endurance of Indigenous lives and traditions under Hispanic colonial rule.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in Tempe, Arizona, November 10-13, 1994. Research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Frederic Hicks and Stephen Perkins for their comments on the meeting paper, and Perkins, Michael Barton, and Julia Hernandez de Chance for their help with the transcription and tabulation of Tecali's marriage records. Special thanks go to two anonymous HAHR reviewers. The following abbreviations are used for archival material: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI); Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico City (AGN); Archivo General de Notarfas del Estado de Puebla (AGNP); Archivo Municipal de Cuauhtinchan (AMC); Archivo Municipal de Tecali (AMT); Archivo Parroquial de Tecali (APT); Archivo Judicial de Puebla, microfilm collection of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City (AJP-MNAH); and Archivo Judicial de Tecali in the same microfilm collection (AJT-MNAH). 1. The term cacique, of Arawak origin, was widely used by Spaniards in the New World and was initially applied to successors of pre-Hispanic rulers or ruling families. Principales could be relatives of caciques, successors of the pre-Hispanic second-echelon nobility (such as the Nahua pipiltin), or political officeholders and their successors. Pedro Carrasco, transformaci6n de la cultura indigena durante la colonia, Historia Mexicana 25 (1975), 182. 2. The classic conceptualization of caciques as brokers can be found in Eric R. Wolf, Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: American Anthropologist 58 (1956), 1065-78. Important substantive contributions on sixteenth-century Mesoamerican caciques and Indian village elites in general are numerous. Special influences on the present research include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-181o (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964); Delfina E. L6pez Sarrelangue, La nobleza indigena de Pdtzcuaro en la e'poca virreinal (Mexico City: UNAM, 1965); Ronald Spores, The Mixtec Kings and Their People (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1967); idem, The Mixtecs in Ancient and Colonial Times (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1984); William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1972); Carrasco,

There has been numerous documents about Sor Juana since Juan Camacho published his first volume in Madrid in 1689, and more so during 1995, her anniversary. There is no certainty about the date of her birth, it is placed between 1651 and 1653, she died in 1695. The magazines A BSIDE. REVISTA DE CULTURA MEXICANA during the period 1941-1973 published 25 articles, and CONTEMPORÂNEOS eight articles from 1929 to 1931; the BOLETIN DE LA BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL published five articles in 1951 and I960, but none of these deal with her library. The following authors have discussed her library: the writer, Ermilo Abreu Gómezf1934); Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (1944); the art historian and critic, Francisco de la Maza (1952); the poet Octavio Paz (1982); the ex-director of the Mexican National Library, Ignacio Osorio (1986). I think that the 4000 volumes of this library played an important part in her writings, and much more than companions: objects of her world. This library unfortunately, disintegrated by her at the end of her life, is an example of library collections and libraries of the New World, together with the first academic library built in Mexico City: "La Biblioteca del Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco " (1536). To know about the titles of some of these books, whose existence can only be seen in two of the paintings of Sor Juana, one by the Mexican artist Juan de Miranda, active from 1697 to 1711, owned by the "Universidad Nacional Autônoma de México", and the other by the Mexican painter, Miguel Cabrera at the "Museo Nacional de Historia del Castillo de Chapultepec" in Mexico City, gives us an idea not only of her library, but of her world. The XVIIc in Mexico City is a baroque century with its four social entities: the Court, the Church, the City and the Convent in which Sor Juana lived. If we take into consideration her writings, there was a fifth entity, the Hispanic literary world. Sor Juana with her beauty, charm, intelligence and ability to deal with the most important personalities of her time was considered a string between the New and the Old Worlds because of her literary contributions as a woman, more so as an American woman of the XVIIc. She is pondered by Alatorref1995) as the spiritual gold similar to the gold extracted from the New World mines. In a metaphorical way her writings are the result of her intellect and of the contents extracted from the books which represented the world of knowledge contained in her library.

The Mexican collection at Lund’s Museum of Sketches in is an unusual and valuable collection both from a Mexican and from an international perspective: the collection was built by Gunnar Bråhammar in the late 1960s, and counts works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Juan O’Gorman but also Francisco Eppens, Rufino Tamayo, González Camarena, Raul Angiano, Leopoldo Méndez and Desiderio Xochitiotzin. The article discusses especially “the New Deal” by Rivera, “the Image of Mexico” at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City by Morado Chavez, and “El Pájaro Amarillo” by Goertiz, and the great stone mosaic at the Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico by O’Gorman.

Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, edited by Miruna Achim, Susan Deans-Smith, and Sandra Rozental, explores how museum collections in Mexico came into being, evolved, or ceased to exist over time, tracing their movements through institutional spaces and exhibits. The contributors include Bertina Olmedo Vera, Laura Cházaro, Christina Bueno, Frida Gorbach, Haydeé López Hernández, Carlos Mondragón, and Mario Rufer, in addition to the editors. Each essayist confronts the complex ways in which major museums, such as the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Cultures of the World, and, most importantly, the National Museum of Anthropology, have built up, negotiated, and deconstructed their collections from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.The editors state that their purpose is political. Asserting that there “is nothing fixed or intrinsic about the things collected,” they hope to undo entrenched notions about objects that have become the anchors of national patrimony (p. 18). By highlighting how the placement of an object can alter its meaning, they tear down narratives that have been assigned to those objects by their placement in national museums. How does the meaning of an artifact change if it is placed in a museum versus displayed as a public monument? Should it be exhibited in Mexico City or in the area where it originated? Should such objects be arranged in new exhibits to engender new meaning? Or should exhibitions remain unaltered from the time that the museum opens, to preserve the historical intentions of the original curators? If a particular exhibition becomes imbued with nationalistic meaning, such as the anthropological displays on the upper level of the National Museum of Anthropology, how should a curator approach the task of reorganizing the material?Multiple essays address how an object's role in constructing national identity is affected when that object is suspected of being a forgery or a replica. In “Forgery and the Science of the ‘Authentic,’” Miruna Achim and Bertina Olmedo Vera describe how artifacts in the National Museum of Anthropology are pulled from public view when their authenticity becomes suspect. Such objects are not stored as teaching tools or researched further but placed into an unorganized part of the storage room, where all their historical documentation might be lost. This prevents the objects from being included in future exhibits or returned to local museums at the sites where they were excavated.In “A Monolith on the Street,” Sandra Rozental explores the consequences of placing a monumental anthropomorphic sculpture on the street near the National Museum of Anthropology instead of inside the museum. Rozental argues that placing the object outside the museum confuses the message that is conveyed by the object and renders its status ambiguous. While she was examining the sculpture, Rozental overheard a schoolteacher telling his class that the sculpture was a replica and remarking, “Who knows where the original is, but this surely isn't authentic because it wouldn't be outside like this” (p. 280). The ability of this particular sculpture to appeal to the individual nationalism of Mexican citizens might be undercut if they believe it to be a replica, and this highlights the legitimating force of the museum as a nationalist institution.In “The Tangled Journey of the Cross of Palenque,” Christina Bueno argues for the nationalist implications of the museum's role in repairing and preserving artifacts. The restoration of the Cross of Palenque, a Maya triptych, is contextualized by Bueno as a deliberate display of Porfirian nationalism. The government, although neglectful in letting sections of the triptych leave the country, was later able to oversee their repatriation, join and repair the pieces, and put the restored cross on display in the national museum. Bueno documents how museum officials understood this process as investing this particular object with national importance.Several essays explore the representation of Indigenous people in the National Museum of Anthropology. In particular, in “Clues and Gazes: Indigenous Faces in the Museo Nacional de Antropología,” Haydeé López Hernández examines the photographic documentation developed for the Photographic Archive of Ethnography. This photographic project aimed to anthropologically document Indigenous people in Mexico from 1961 to 1964. The essay shows the disconnect between the project's anthropological and national intentions and draws attention to how limited the display of such images is in the museum. The significance of this photographic series has eroded over time as the curators have let the displays become dated and incomplete, with many pieces migrating into the storeroom.Entitling this volume Museum Matters evokes James Cuno's Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (2011). While Cuno addresses the larger role that museums play in society, this collection of essays focuses specifically on museums within a developing heritage system in Mexico. This volume highlights the ways in which modern curators struggle with the weight of the historicity of the museums and their collections while trying to craft a narrative of modern nationalism based on these historical and archaeological objects. The essays will be useful for students studying the development and longevity of Mexico's national identity and the role of museums in constructing connections to the country's Indigenous history.

The Grolier Codex has been a controversial document ever since its late discovery in 1965. Because of its rare iconographical content and its unknown origin, specialists are not keen to assure its authenticity that would set it amongst the other tree known Maya codes in the world (Dresden, Paris Codex and Madrid Codex).The document that has been kept in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, after its exposure in 1971 at the Grolier Club of New York, has been analyzed by a set of non-destructive techniques in order to characterize its materials including paper fibers, preparation layer and colors composition. The methodology included UV imaging, IR reflectography and optic microscopy examinations as well as Particle Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) and Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) using an external beam setup for elemental analysis. All the measurements were carried out at 3MV Pelletron Accelerator of the Instituto de Física, UNAM. The aim of this work is to verify if the materials in the Grolier Codex match those found for other pre-Hispanic documents.From the elemental composition we concluded that the preparation layer shows the presence of gypsum (CaSO4), color red is due to red hematite (Fe2O3) and black is a carbon-based ink. These results agree with previous analyses carried out by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM-EDX) on few samples. However, the presence of Maya Blue in the blue pigment cannot be assured. The examination using UV and IR lights shows homogeneity in the inks and red color but dark areas that contain higher amounts of K in the preparation layer. This paper discusses the results obtained for the UV-IR examinations and the elemental analysis. A comparison with other studies on pre-Hispanic and early colonial codex is presented.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Although the use of cellulose nitrate paint by David A. Siqueiros (1896–1974) is well documented, when and how he used it is not well established. This article focuses on a technical examination of six paintings Siqueiros made between 1931 and 1949. The paintings analyzed come from two collections: Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Findings presented here show that Siqueiros did not use cellulose nitrate for a painting he made in 1933, despite having made that claim decades later. Rather, evidence indicates Siqueiros used it in Mexico City just prior to his trip to New York in 1935 where he established a workshop to further explore innovation in painting technique and focus especially on ways to paint without a brush. Examination of a small work from 1936 or 1937 by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), who attended the workshop, confirms he also experimented with the medium. Afterwards, in 1939, Siqueiros again altered his technique and materials in a way to suggest that rendering specific details in his paintings was more important than being restricted to the innovative “brush-free” effects developed in the workshop.

About the Artist: Natalie Robertson Moana Nepia Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònn chaidh) is an Aotearoa/New Zealand pho tographer, video artist, and senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology whose work has been exhibited at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), Museo Nacional de las Culturas (Mexico City), Musée de la Civilisation (Québec), and Cuba Casa de la Cultura de Tulum (Havana), as well as in Germany, China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States, New Caledonia, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Whether documenting the effects of modern agricultural practices on the natural environment, observing intimate rituals of care and communal responsibility, or tracing tribal pathways along rivers from aerial drone cameras, Robertson draws on both customary and contemporary ways of seeing and histories of storytelling that connect people to places and to one another. Robertson’s work may also be understood in terms of what she describes as a “gap between what is real and what is imagined,” as “the distance between what is now, and what will be” in “the wing-beat of a piwakawaka, a fantail.” Moments captured photographically in this way reveal as much about creative potential and imagination as they do about social concern. Robertson’s photographic contributions for A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, written by Ngarino Ellis (2016), won the Judith Binney Best First Book Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In early 2019, she represented Aotearoa/New Zealand at the second Honolulu Biennial (https://www.honolulubiennial.org/honolulubiennial2019). Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Moana Nepia The art featured in this issue can be viewed in full color in the online versions. [End Page v] Click for larger view View full resolution Boiled Pig Head, Te Rimu, Tikapa, by Natalie Robertson, 2012. Inkjet print on Ilford Gold Silk Paper, 22 x 28 inches. In October 1769, Captain James Cook and his Endeavour crew reached Aotearoa/New Zealand. Within the first hour of land-fall at Turanga-nui-a-Kiwa (now the site of Gisborne city) crew members killed Te Maro, a local Ngāti Oneone rangatira (chief). By the end of the next day, several more Māori were shot dead. Two hundred and fifty years later, these events still loom large in the minds of local Māori. As in Hawai‘i, where he was eventually killed, Cook is remembered by many for the tragic consequences of such interactions and the devastating impacts of colonization that followed rather than for his application of scientific methods to exploration. Robertson’s Boiled Pig Head takes on heightened meaning in this light. Feral pigs nicknamed “Captain Cookers,” first introduced by early European visitors, are now hunted by Māori; boiled with kūmara (sweet potato), puha (sow thistle), and watercress; or cooked in hāngi (earth ovens), especially on large festive occasions. [End Page vi] Click for larger view View full resolution Nukutaimemeha, Rangitukia, by Natalie Robertson, 2011. Inkjet print on Ilford Gold Silk Paper, 22 x 28 inches. For the people of Ngāti Porou, from Aotearoa/New Zealand’s East Coast region, Nukutaimemeha is the name of the waka from which Maui fished up Te Ika-a-Maui (North Island). They believe it remains in fossilized form on Mt Hikurangi, the tallest mountain in this region and the first point of land in Aotearoa/New Zealand to see the sun each day. The waka in this image, bearing the full name Te Aio o Nukutaimemeha, was carved by Greg Matahi Whakataka-Brightwell, who is renowned for helping to rejuvenate the art of oceangoing waka building in Aotearoa/New Zealand and introducing waka ama (outrigger canoe) racing to the country’s sporting scene. Commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Nukutaimemeha measures approximately 45 meters long and was completed in 1999. Never launched, Nukutaimemeha has rested in a paddock at the mouth of the Waiapu River for many years. Plans to move it to Mt Hikurangi were announced in 2019. [End Page vii] Click for larger view...

The origins of two purportedly pre-Columbian Mexican crystal skulls

<p>Este artículo analiza los edificios que albergan tres instituciones arqueológicas y etnográficas de primer orden en tres países: el Museo Nacional de Antropología en la ciudad de México, concebido por Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (1964); el Canadian Museum of Civilization, en Ottawa/Gatineau, obra de Douglas Cardinal (1989); y el National Museum of the American Indian de Washington, D.C., proyectado también por el despacho de Cardinal (2004). La primera parte del texto describe aspectos arquitectónicos, curatoriales y museográficos de los tres museos. Posteriormente se presenta una interpretación patrimonial comparada de los tres recintos y sus respectivos acervos arqueológicos y etnográficos. Finalmente se comparan los riesgos conceptuales de la construcción de “patrimonios culturales indígenas”.</p><p> </p>

The original tribute list of Moctezuma's empire is still in existence2 and can be consulted in the Salon de Codices of the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia at Mexico City. It is made up of thick pages of so-called maguey paper, bound along one edge into a book, instead of being folded back and forth screen-wise like most native codices. It was primarily a very practical, book-keeping document, and the glyphs were not fantastically elaborated as in more ceremonial codices; they are strong and effective cartoons of the kinds of tribute. Four hundred years have not completely obliterated the simple colors of the original, and the glyphs of the maize plant still show green leaves, yellow tassels, and ears with green or dark red silks. The tribute list is arranged by provinces, a province to a page (see plate 5). The glyphs for the towns are arranged around the lower and outer edges of the page. 'The tribute due from the province fills up the interior of the page, the various articles being arranged in a more or less standardized fashion, so that maize and beans are in the upper left-hand corner on fifteen of the sixteen pages where they occur. The glyphs, while crudely drawn, are nearly always effective representations of the tribute: jars of honey, mantles of cotton cloth, live eagles, etc., from the top of which protrude the glyphs for number (digits, banners, purses, as the case may be). The original list has undergone several changes, some of which enhance its value to us. It was annotated in N'ahuatl (Aztec) in early post-conquest times and even more briefly in Spanish at a later date. Unfortunately, these annotations have never been adequately reproduced in any of the editions which the manuscript has suffered. About eight pages are now missing, some of them having disappeared since a copy was prepared for the 'Codex Mendocino'.3 This latter well-known 'Codex' was made up for the Emperor Charles V by an Indian copyist who worked in such haste that he inserted a statement to that effect as an apology to future scholars.4 The document was designed to tell the emperor something about his new possessions and, along with copies of several pre-conquest documents,

Of the extant artistic monuments created by the Aztecs of Pre-Columbian Mexico, the Aztec Calendar Stone is undoubtedly the most important (Fig. 1). The thirteen-and-a-half foot circular polychromed basalt relief has been used to illustrate Postclassic Mexican cosmological concepts and the nature of their manifestation in Postclassic visual art more often than any other single image of the period.1 Discovered in 1790 lying face down in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City (formerly the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán), and seen today in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, the Calendar Stone has, further, come to symbolize for the Mexican people the beauty and complexity of their Pre-Columbian heritage. Given its dual role as a national symbol and a key to scholarly understanding of Postclassic art and cosmology, it is critically important that the iconography of the Calendar Stone be fully comprehended.