"Hassig's position is daring and potentially controversial and will
be mandatory reading for those who deal with calendrical systems."
-- Dr. Barbara J. Price, Columbia University
Based on their enormously complex calendars that recorded cycles
of many kinds, the Aztecs and other ancient Mesoamerican
civilizations are generally believed to have had a cyclical, rather
than linear, conception of time and history. This boldly
revisionist book challenges that understanding. Ross Hassig offers
convincing evidence that for the Aztecs time was predominantly
linear, that it was manipulated by the state as a means of
controlling a dispersed tribute empire, and that the Conquest cut
off state control and severed the unity of the calendar, leaving
only the lesser cycles. From these, he asserts, we have
inadequately reconstructed the pre-Columbian calendar and so
misunderstood the Aztec conception of time and history.
Hassig first presents the traditional explanation of the Aztec
calendrical system and its ideological functions and then marshals
contrary evidence to argue that the Aztec elite deliberately used
calendars and timekeeping to achieve practical political ends. He
further traces how the Conquest played out in the temporal realm as
Spanish conceptions of time partially displaced the Aztec ones. His
findings promise to revolutionize our understanding of how the
Aztecs and other Mesoamerican societies conceived of time and
history.
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