Time in Pre-Columbian America

Abstract

Celebrated for scholarly symposia on Pre-Columbian America, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. mobilized a program on time in Mesoamerica and the Andes in the run-up to the 21 December 2012 completion of baktun 13, a calendrically significant interval in the Maya Long Count odometer of time. The world at that time was preoccupied with the meaning of time in the ancient Maya world, and international media routinely spotlighted the dubious claims of self-appointed purveyors of apocalypse. On the other hand, the 14 articles collected here and edited by symposium organizer Anthony F. Aveni emerged from the presentations by authentic experts in astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and history of science. Varied in focus and approach, these papers broadly belong to studies of astronomy and culture, with an emphasis on time, the calendar, and time-factored enterprises. According to the dust wrapper, the collection addresses how history was conceived, codified, and preserved in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes, how enterprises—particularly rituals—were timed and why, and what we can know about the indigenous perceptions and applications of time from what these societies left behind. The book’s title suggests a broad and comprehensive review—a publication that consolidates the basics, demonstrates their operation across a variety of circumstances, shows how they generate shared and divergent responses, and explains why this is so and what it means. In fact, most of the articles are very technical, highly specialized, and directed to a limited and informed audience. The material is detailed, dense, and demanding. The book opens with Aveni’s accessible and inviting introduction, and once past Richard Landes’s worthy and concept-heavy examination of end times, ordinary times, and chronological precision in the West, the greater part of the book is divided in two. One section is said to examine how time was sensed in Pre-Columbian America, and the other is assigned to the way time was registered in its communities. That distinction is, however, labored and seems designed to ease the reader’s burden with an illusion of structure. The partition doesn’t really tell the reader what is most important about the contributions each section harbors. 1048989 JHA0010.1177/00218286211048989Journal for the History of AstronomyBook Reviews book-review2021