WRITING SYSTEMS AND CALENDARS IN MESOAMERICA: STOCKTAKING AND NEW RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
The study of Mesoamerican writing systems and calendars has undergone a profound renewal in recent decades. Advances in the decipherment of Maya and Nahuatl epigraphy, comparative analysis of pre-Hispanic and colonial codices, the rise of archaeoastronomy, and the study of ancient calendars have opened new perspectives for understanding the production, transmission, and social use of knowledge in indigenous societies past and present. At the same time, fundamental debates persist regarding the origin, nature, and diversity of writing traditions, the relationships among image, text, and orality, as well as the political, ritual, and cosmological functions of calendrical systems in the pre-Hispanic, colonial, modern, and contemporary periods.
This symposium proposes to bring together research devoted to the writing systems and calendars of Mesoamerica with the aim of offering a critical assessment of recent advances and exploring new avenues of research. Specialists in epigraphy, ethnohistory, archaeoastronomy, anthropology, linguistics, philology, art history and related disciplines are invited to reflect on the diversity of forms of record-keeping and time organization developed by Mesoamerican peoples, from the pre-Hispanic period to the present.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the study of indigenous hieroglyphic and pictographic writing systems; processes of innovation, continuity and transformation of writing traditions; divinatory and ritual calendars; astronomy and timekeeping; the relationships among writing, memory and power; the circulation of specialized knowledge among different areas of Mesoamerica; the materiality and symbolism of writing supports; digital humanities applied to epigraphy and codices; and contemporary practices linked to calendrical computation and the preservation of indigenous knowledge.
The central aim of the symposium is to foster dialogue among different academic traditions and areas of specialization that have often developed their debates in parallel. By linking the study of writing and time as complementary systems of knowledge production and transmission, the symposium seeks to contribute to a more integrated understanding of Mesoamerican ways of conceptualizing history, space, time and the cosmological order. Likewise, the symposium aspires to identify emerging research agendas and to strengthen international collaboration networks in a field that continues to offer fundamental contributions to the intellectual and cultural history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
