Convergence And Cultural Encounters: The Calendar Wheels of Early Colonial Central Mexico (16th century)

Public defence of PhD thesis by Mikkel Bøg Clemmensen.

Assessment committee

  • Head of Department Annika Hvithamar, Chair (University of Copenhagen)
  • Professor Justyna Olko (Faculty of Liberal Arts, Warsaw University)
  • Professor John F. Chuchiak IV (Missouri State University)

Moderator of the defence

  • Associate professor Trine Brox (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of the Library of the Faculty of Humanities, Karen Blixens Plads 7
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond), Søren Kierkegaards Plads 1
  • At the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, Karen Blixens Plads 8

 

A concern of recent scholarship on early colonial Mexico (16th century) has been to move away from a previous dominating focus on the European perspective, and towards representing the voices of colonised and colonisers in a more equal manner. These efforts have led to a revision of previous interpretations of the sources, and to new methodological approaches and theoretical models for the cultural encounter. Especially important in this process has been the recent advances in bringing together knowledge of the two cultural realms, Mesoamerica and Europe, prior to contact, and the effect that cultural overlaps, or ‘convergences’, had on the formation of a hybrid colonial culture.

Following up on these issues, this study zooms in on a well-known, although understudied, group of circular calendar diagrams from early colonial Central Mexico. These ‘calendar wheels’ visualise the complex Mesoamerican calendar cycles of 260 and 365 days and relate them to the Christian calendar. In a modern context, the calendar wheels have often been included both in popular scientific and academic literature as illustrations of Mesoamerican conceptions of time. Recently, however, the calendar wheels have been subjected to more critical academic scrutiny, and the dominating interpretation today is that the wheels were mainly the result of a European intrusion into the Mesoamerican modes of expression, and thus not authentic examples of Mesoamerican calendars.

In this study, I reassess the entire existing corpus of colonial calendar wheels and propose a new way of viewing them that is less deterministic in ascribing them to either a Mesoamerican or a European origin. By understanding the calendar wheels within the broader theoretical and methodological paradigm of colonial art, I argue that it is possible to view these artefacts not as markers of one single cultural adherence, but as a format in which colonial authors, looking to fulfil their personal political and religious agendas, saw an opportunity for bridging the cultural gap. I debunk the current idea that circular calendars did not exist in Precolumbian Mesoamerica, and I show how colonial authors, friars and indigenous scribes alike, carefully managed to integrate two similar traditions of circular calendars into ‘renewed’ colonial designs. Doing so, these authors exploited the double heritage of the format and invented a mode of communication that could appeal broadly within the bi-cultural colonial discourse.

Considering the calendar wheel-format as a particularly apt example of a cultural element shared by Mesoamerica and Europe prior to contact, this study offers some final reflections upon the importance of convergence as a fundamental cultural dynamic in the colonial encounter.