Origin from 1954
Colonial chronicles and indigenous codices read against each other and against archaeology, given a dedicated journal in 1954 with the founding of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Weighs missionary accounts of Aztec and Maya ritual against native testimony.
Facts
Method
Methodcombined reading of colonial era indigenous and Spanish documentary sources against archaeological and linguistic evidence, treating both as partial and biased records to be checked against each other 2 Subject
Subjectthe religious and social history of Mesoamerican peoples as recorded in colonial era codices, chronicles and legal documents, read alongside archaeology rather than as neutral fact 2 Identity
Field Category Parent Field Origins
Emerged As Named Discipline Learn More
A New Journal Gives Native Testimony a Place Beside the Colonial Archive
Ethnohistory reads colonial era chronicles, indigenous codices, mission records and legal documents together, treating each as a partial and interested account of Mesoamerican society to be checked against the others and against archaeology, rather than treating the Spanish colonial record as neutral fact. The method gained its first dedicated professional home in 1954, when the American Society for Ethnohistory was founded, growing out of the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference, and began publishing the journal Ethnohistory the same year, giving historians working with native testimony a venue distinct from either conventional archival history or archaeology alone.
Aztec, Maya and other Mesoamerican religious practice survives today mainly through colonial Spanish description, often written by missionaries with an explicit interest in condemning what they described, alongside a smaller body of surviving indigenous pictorial and alphabetic testimony. Mesoamerican ethnohistory is what lets the atlas weigh a colonial friar's account of a ritual against surviving native sources and archaeological evidence for the same practice, rather than repeating the colonial account as though it were disinterested reporting.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Maya, Figures This source names Maya directly: "Weighs missionary accounts of Aztec and Maya ritual against native testimony."
Branch Of
Open Questions Needing This
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.