Gabina Aurora Perez Jimenez – författare

The Mixtec, or the people of Nuu Savi (Nation of the Rain God), one of the major civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica, made their home in the highlands of Oaxaca, where they resisted both Aztec military expansion and the Spanish conquest. In 'Encounter with the Plumed Serpent', two leading scholars present and interpret the sacred histories narrated in the Mixtec codices, the largest surviving collection of pre-Columbian manuscripts in existence. In these screenfold books, ancient painter-historians chronicled the politics of the Mixtec from approximately ad900 to 1521, portraying the royal families, rituals, wars, alliances, and ideology of the times. By analysing and cross-referencing the codices, which have been fragmented and dispersed in far-flung archives, the authors attempt to reconstruct Mixtec history. Their synthesis here builds on long examination of the ancient manuscripts. Adding useful interpretation and commentary, Jansen and Perez Jimenez synthesise the large body of surviving documents into the first unified narrative of Mixtec sacred history.

This bilingual book is the outcome of a research project undertaken between the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum and a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous archaeologists and activists from Mexico and Guatemala. The chapters include new interpretations of some written narratives in the Mesoamerican collection at the British Museum, as well as critical reflections on the politics of Indigenous participation in museum projects and collection research. The book includes new scholarly interpretations of the Tonindeye Codex, the Xiuhpohualli of Tenochtitlan and the Yaxchilan lintels and, seeking to read these Mesoamerican narratives in an embodied way, it hopes to foster temporal imagination in the museum. It also discusses Indigenous epistemologies while focusing on the relevance of mobilising this work strategically outside of the museum, among descendant communities. In this way, researchers and visitors might interrogate their political and emotional positions towards colonial collections.

The Mixtec civilization (of Oaxaca, Mexico) is one of the most interesting to survive from pre-colonial Mesoamerica. Among its characteristic products were highly artistic pictographic codices depicting the history and dynasties of its city-states. This handbook surveys and describes the illustrated Mixtec manuscripts that survive in Europe, the United States and Mexico, outlines the history of their decipherment, current questions, discussions and methodologies relating to readings, social organisation, religion and historical drama, and surveys the six centuries of Mixtec history covered in the texts.