Provides a grammatical description of San Bartolome Zoogocho Zapotec, an endangered Otomanguean language spoken in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The initial six chapters are concerned with providing a description of the major grammatical features of the language, while the final two examine two major current theoretical issues: parts-of-speech and word order.

See also Diccionario zapoteco de San Bartolomé Zoogocho, Oaxaca

A tool for correctly identifying hundreds of abbreviations found in the hand written documents of the Spanish colonial period. The Guide is concise, easy to use and of a very manageable size. All of the abbreviations were scanned from photo copies of extant Spanish documents written between the years 1500 and 1700 and are presented in their original handwriting. Together with each abbreviation is a printed display of the letters represented, the full spelling of the word or words in early modern Spanish and the current Spanish spelling.

This volume seeks to address key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism by examining what they themselves recorded and why they did so.

This book is a historical and archeological examination of the Isthmus Zapotec state, which was established at Tehuantepec in late pre-hispanic times through a campaign of conquest and colonization, and the responses that its descendant populations made to the complex political, economic, and cultural changes introduced by Spanish colonialism. Using complementary archival and archeological sources, the book details the transformation of Isthmus Zapotec society under colonialism and the enduring structures through which its members redefined their political autonomy.

Demonstrates in exciting & varied ways the importance of wills as ethnohistorical sources & gives voice to individual Mayans & Incas.

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death, and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. This is the first full-length study of Spanish attitudes toward death and the afterlife in the peak years of the Counter-Reformation. It contains an analysis of the death rituals requested in hundreds of sixteenth-century Madrid testaments, as well as a detailed account of the ways in which the "good" deaths of King Philip II and Saint Teresa of Avila were interpreted by contemporaries.

A set of Nahuatl-language annals by a Native American writer of Puebla, Mexico, reporting on his people's local history from the coming of the Christian faith down to his own day. These records were part of a corpus of such annals produced in the Tlaxcala-Puebla region during this period. Here in This Year for the first time brings two sets of Nahuatl annals: the other one being from a more provincial locale to the English-speaking world, presenting the original Nahuatl with facing, readable translations.

"In total, fifty-eight lavishly illustrated chapters present detailed yet accessible commentaries from a team of leading specialists in the study of writing. Together they explain and clarify the birth, evolution, and dissemination of over thirty key scripts and alphabets and their numerous derivatives. The breadth and scope of material covered, along with the detailed sources of documentation provided, make A History of Writing an essential and exciting new contribution to existing scholarship on this fascinating subject."--BOOK JACKET

Examining repartimiento production of cochineal, a dyestuff produced exclusively by Oaxacan Indians and representing Mexico's most valued export after silver, this study shows that Indians produced cochineal for the market voluntarily because it provided them with needed income. Overall, the book demonstrates that Mexican Indians were much more actively engaged in the market than customarily imagined, and were adept at promoting their interests despite the discriminating policies of colonialism.

Presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. Addresses a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.

Gives a grammatical sketch of Zapotec (Mitla Vallay, Oaxaca, Mexico).

See also Mitla Zapotec Grammar.

Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Chatinos: Ancient Peoples of Southern Mexico examines the origins, history, and interrelationships of the civilizations that arose and flourished in Oaxaca. Provides an up-to-date summary of the current state of research findings and archaeological evidence. Uses contemporary social theory to address many key problems relating to archaeology of the Americas, including the dynamics of social life and the rise and fall of civilizations. Adds clarity to ongoing debates over cultural change and interregional interactions in ancient Mesoamerican societies. Supplemented with compelling illustrations, photographs, and line drawings of various archaeological sites and artifacts

Examines ecclesiastical texts written in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya to illustrate the role of these texts in conveying and reflecting various Catholic messages, and thus Catholicisms throughout colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan. It demonstrates how published and unpublished sermons, confessional manuals, catechisms, and other religious texts betray "official" and "unofficial" versions of Catholicism, and how these versions changed throughout the colonial period according to indigenous culture, local situations, and broader early modern events. The book's study of these texts also allows for a better appreciation of the negotiations that occurred during the evangelization process between native and Spanish cultures, the center and periphery, and between official expectations and everyday realities. And by employing both Nahuatl and Maya religious texts, Nahua and Maya Catholicism allows for a uniquely comparative study that expands beyond Central Mexico to include Yucatan.

Presumes no previous knowledge of the language. Treating all essential features of Nahuatl, it is organized on purely pedagogical principles. The book is in large format, almost like a workbook, with a great abundance of examples that serve as exercises. The orthography and vocabulary are those found in texts of the time, and the last several of the twenty lessons give the student training in working with texts as they were actually written. An Epilogue surveys many of the published Nahuatl texts and an Appendix presents substantial selections from ten different texts.

In 1975, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University acquired an exceptional mid-16th-century map of Mexico City, which, until 1521, had been the capital of the Aztecs, the Nahua-speaking peoples who dominated the Valley of Mexico. This extraordinary six-by-three-foot document, showing landholdings and indigenous rulers, has yielded a wealth of information about the artistic, linguistic, and material culture of the Nahua after the Spanish invasion. This book marks the first publication of both the complete map and the multi-disciplinary research that it spurred.

A careful syntactic analysis of Quiegolani Zapotec Syntax, presented descriptively and with a theoretical analysis.

San Lucas Quiavin Zapotec, an endangered and little-examined indigenous language of Mexico, shows a range of syntactic and morphological phenomena incompatible with standard Minimalist accounts of verb movement. This work proposes a VP-remnant raising account for these phenomena, motivated by Kayne's (1992) antisymmetry program. The book also examines the consequences of phrasal remnant movement for negation constructions, and the interpretation of tense, aspect, and mood.

Presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator’s situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land.

Rethinks the processes of cultural change and indigenous resistance and accommodation to colonial rule through a focus on the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous, ethnically diverse, and overwhelmingly indigenous region of colonial Mexico. Tells the story of the making of colonialism at the edge of empire through the eyes of native intermediary figures: indigenous governors clothed in Spanish silks, priests, assistants, interpreters, economic middlemen, legal agents, landed nobility, and Indian conquistadors.

This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, "people of the rain place." These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750. The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts.

Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol, and script in a succinct and absorbing text. He discusses each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan, as well as topics such as the Cherokee "alphabet" and the writing of runes. Full coverage is given to the history of decipherment, and a provocative chapter devoted to undeciphered scripts challenges the reader: can these codes ever be broken?

An earlier edition is also available.

Andrew Robinson tells the fascinating story of the history of writing, shedding light on its development and examining the enormous variety of writing and scripts we use today. Starting with the origins of writing five thousand years ago, with cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Robinson explains how these early forms developed into hundreds of scripts, including the Roman alphabet and Chinese characters. He reveals how the modern writing symbols and abbreviations we take for granted today--including airport signage and text messaging--resemble ancient ones much more closely than we might think. The book also includes a chronology of events from 3300 BC to AD 2000, a list of titles for further reading, and an index.

Zapotec Civilization describes the work of Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus, and their colleagues over more than two decades in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. Here the Zapotecs created one of the world's autochthonous civilizations, to set beside that of the Aztecs and the Maya in its achievements. At its peak 1,500 years ago, the Zapotec capital of Monte Alban - with its magnificent temples, tombs, ball-courts, and hieroglyphic inscriptions - dominated a society of over 100,000 people, with farflung territorial outposts. Yet a millennium earlier Monte Alban had been uninhabited, and the valley's population less than one tenth its later size. What caused this cultural florescence? Marcus and Flannery go back to the very beginnings of settlement in Oaxaca, 10,000 years ago, to provide the answers. They explicitly set out to discover whether the contesting claims of evolutionary anthropologists stand up to the hard evidence in the field. .

Presents a small sampling of the oral literature of the Zapotec people (Mexico) in Spanish and English.El Folklore de San Lorenzo.

Includes chapters on Zapotec history and politics.