Eduard Seler
Notes: somewhere I read thar Eduard Seler, the 19th Century German archaeologist who explored Mexico, came to the thought that the different tribes/cultures were unified...that's a long reach to support!...a whimsy might be that they were unified like the Roman Empire was unified...there were Roman towns all over, with Roman architecture, but clearly in an empire there are a lot of individual states that retain what they can of their own culture...I dunno...try to nail this down, as in the lore of the scholars, the subject of a unified Mesoamerica comes up, but dismissed, or diminished, as the evidence for this thought thought to be insubstantial...a few things shared by all, but no great import to that..
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It was the accumulation of new data from Central and Western Mexico and a re-examination and data from Southern Mexico and that allowed AMNH affiliate Eduard Seler, who conducted his own research in West Mexico and Oaxaca, and Clark Wissler (chair 1906-1941) to suggest that 1) there was a region of Mexico and Central America that had a shared cultural unity; 2) the origins of those cultures could be found in Mexico deep in antiquity; and 3) Middle American cultures were distinct from those of North America or South America. These ideas were later formalized into the concept of "Meso-america" by Paul Kirchhoff.
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"The visitor, in passing through this hall will notice that the civilizations presented here are more or less similar to one another and have perhaps a New World common origin. they are quite different, however, from the civilizations of Egypt, Greece or China." (p. 71)
https://www.amnh.org/research/anthropology/collections/collections-history/meso-american-archaeology
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"more or less" "perhaps" "quite different"...not so...Mesoamericans are as alike a peas in a pod, and link to the North American Southwest, and South America...for sometime Egypt, Greece or China...with one swat the Museum's caption to their Mexico exhibit tried to pigeon hole everything...that page only goes to 1945, I think...don't know what the Natural History Museum's caption for Mesoamerica is nowadays...could find it I guess...brb...
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In essence, the hall of Mexico and Central America is dedicated to the archaeology of Middle America. Middle America is a geographic region that encompasses the area between the northern border of Mexico and the southern border of Panama. Mesoamerica is a culture area whose inhabitants developed a shared set of traits including corn-based agriculture and general ideas about the supernatural world. And, it is an area where state-level societies developed. The exact geographic boundaries of Mesoamerica shifted over time. The northern limit was a few hundred miles north of Mexico City while the southern limit included parts of Honduras and Nicaragua. Two modern geographic areas in this hall, Panama and Costa Rica, lie outside of the boundaries of Mesoamerica. In these regions complex societies called chiefdoms developed but state level societies did not.
https://anthro.amnh.org/anthropology/databases/projects/mca_index.cfm?action=cult
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touring a museum is a bit like reading Nat Geo...and one is looking at the life works of many scholars reduced to captions, loglines...'general idea' pushed things into the realm of discontinuity...I imagine if I went to the Mexico exhibits in museums all over, I would find the same take, a lean to discontinuity among the tribes of Mesoamerican, North America, to say nothing of South America...the shared enigmas/motifs common to all of them being discovered suggests otherwise...but I dunno...I just sort of follow where things on web take me...and plot on an imaginary map a step fret with triangle in Chan Chab, and a step fret with triangle at Monte Alban...hmmph...but I'm getting ahead of myself...thought here is to glue together the Mesoamericans...Eduard Seler thought they were, and I saw a quote somewhere...brb...
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Kubler (1970:143-144) generalizes this principle thus:
Disjunction, which is a mode of renovation, may be said to happen whenever the members of a successor civilization refashion their inheritance by gearing the predecessor's forms to new meanings, and by clothing in new forms those old meanings which remain acceptable. Continuous form does not predicate continuous meaning, nor does continuity of form or of meaning necessarily imply continuity of culture. On the contrary, prolonged continuities of form or meaning, on the order
of a thousand years, may mask ... a cultural discontinuity deeper than that between classical antiquity and the middle ages. . . . We may not use Aztec ritual descriptions as compiled by Sahagim about 1550 to explain murals painted at Teotihuacan a thousand years earlier, for the same reason that we would not easily get agreement in interpreting the Hellenistic images of Palmyra by using Arabic texts on Islamic ritual. The idea of disjunction . . . makes every ethnological analogy questionable by insisting on discontinuity rather than its opposite whenever long durations are under discussion.
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Kubler's vigorous negative position on this issue highlights its importance. How much continuity in religious concepts and ritual was there in Mesoamerica from Preclassic to Conquest times? If there was very little, then Contact period ethnographic data will obviously be of little aid in interpreting Preclassic iconography. If Mesoamerican civilization, however, was essentially a single
overall unified co-tradition beginning with the Olmec efflorescence, then many fundamental religious-ritual continuities must have characterized it. Actually, in my opinion both views can be supported with various arguments and data, depending on what aspects of Mesoamerican culture history one selects and emphasizes in support of one's position. There were undoubtedly many partial or complete iconographic-conceptual disjunctions between Olmec and Aztec, but, at the same time, evidence can be adduced that there were probably many continuities as well. In short,
1 suspect that we are dealing with a very mixed bag. If so, detailed analyses of specific instances are obviously going to prove to be more effective in attacking this problem than sweeping pronouncements pro or con.
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Whether all major Mesoamerican groups participated in an essentially similar religious-ritual system or not—an issue that has been the subject of much recent discussion (e.g.. Caso 1971; Jiménez Moreno 1971)—it seems clear that at least a core of interrelated basic concepts was widely reli
gious iconography requires a much more thorough, comprehensive analysis than it has yet received. Until this is accomplished, an attitude of some reserve toward sweeping generalizations such as Kubler's invocation of Panofsky's "law of disjunction" would appear to represent the most prudent position.
pp161-163
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well, there, I've copy/pasted a lot of text going on about the back and forth, unitary or disjunction...I like that bit that goes on about how motifs drift in their meaning...by neighboring tribes, in geography, and in succesive time...there are a lot of scholarly discussion of this on web...just hard to find the search words to bring things up...
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Since few absolute Olmec-to-Aztec iconographie similarities could be expected, the working out of developmental series through what has been called "similiary sériation" (Rowe 1961)—that is, arranging representations in a sequential series on the basis of their degrees of similarity, wherein "like fits on to like"—is crucial. There is obviously great danger of artificiality and procrustean bed forcing here, but, to establish valid iconographie continuities, I see no escape from the necessity of at least attempting to establish these developmental-sequential chains.
same pages
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hmmph..."procrustean bed forcing"...
Procrustean bed. A situation or place that someone is forced into, often violently. In Greek mythology, the giant Procrustes would capture people and then stretch or cut off their limbs to make them fit into his bed.
lol...bbk for second post this afternoon when game is on...
:)
DavidDavid
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