Rethinking Zapotec Time

In this project, David Tavâarez examines the largest and least-known corpus of Indigenous religious texts in the colonial Americas. These were detailed calendars and cosmologies based on pre-Columbian Zapotec cultural norms written by Indigenous scholars for other natives. These calendars, based on traditional Zapotec concepts of time and space, were to be used to plan marriages, burials, and healing treatments, and, most importantly, to provide a detailed schedule for offerings and sacrifices to be given to human ancestors and gods. Using his extensive knowledge of Zapotec, Nahua, and Spanish, Tavâarez is attempting the first full interpretation and historical analysis of the collection alongside historical papers in Mexican archives to understand thisperiod of change and instability--