Fifth Sun


Book Description

Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.




The Rising of the Fifth Sun


Book Description

Peter Collins and Rosa Guzman, having passed their first round of tests in ancient Mexico, are again summoned by the Plumed Serpent who flies them back in time to the first morning of the world. There, the sixth graders witness the origins of human sacrifice as gods throw themselves into the sluggish sun that refuses to rise despite receiving divine fuel. Finally, Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent, blows a hurricane-force wind that lifts the sun and whisks the children to Tollan Two in tenth century Mexico. They meet the young king, Topiltzin, who has banned human sacrifice in Tollan. But his neighbors, the Chiminec, worship Smoking Mirror who demands mass human sacrifice as the price for military victories. The Chiminec declare war on Tollan. Topiltzin proposes an alternative to war. He challenges his neighbor to the sacred ball game which re-enacts the drama of the rising of the Fifth Sun. The winner is to be given complete power over the loser. All members of the losing team will be put to death. Tollan's team includes Topiltzin, three of his finest warriors, and Peter, who volunteers despite Rosa's protests. The outcome of the game produces profound changes in Mexico as well as in the lives of Peter and Rosa.




Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma


Book Description

Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves. Neither naïve nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name. Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.




Handbook to Life in the Aztec World


Book Description

Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.




Aztec Philosophy


Book Description

In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie shows the Aztecs advanced a highly sophisticated and internally coherent systematic philosophy worthy of consideration alongside other philosophies from around the world. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics,\ and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art of the Americas.




Time and the Ancestors


Book Description

Time and the Ancestors: Aztec and Mixtec Ritual Art combines iconographical analysis with archaeological, historical and ethnographic studies and offers new interpretations of enigmatic masterpieces from ancient Mexico, focusing specifically on the symbols and values of the religious heritage of indigenous peoples.




To Feed and Be Fed


Book Description

This book reexamines the structure of Inca society on the eve of the Spanish Conquest. The author argues that native Andean cosmology organized the indigenous political economy as well as spatial and socio-kinship systems.




Aztecs


Book Description

Recreates the culture of the city of Tenochtitlan in its last unthreatened years before it fell to the Spaniards.




Aztec


Book Description

Gary Jennings's Aztec is the extraordinary story of the last and greatest native civilization of North America. Told in the words of one of the most robust and memorable characters in modern fiction, Mixtli-Dark Cloud, Aztec reveals the very depths of Aztec civilization from the peak and feather-banner splendor of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan to the arrival of Hernán Cortás and his conquistadores, and their destruction of the Aztec empire. The story of Mixtli is the story of the Aztecs themselves---a compelling, epic tale of heroic dignity and a colossal civilization's rise and fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




Aztec and Maya Myths


Book Description

The myths of the Aztec and Maya derive from a shared Mesoamerican cultural tradition. This is very much a living tradition, and many of the motifs and gods mentioned in early sources are still evoked in the lore of contemporary Mexico and Guatemala. Professor Taube discusses the different sources for Aztec and Maya myths. The Aztec empire began less than 200 years before the Spanish conquest, and our knowledge of their mythology derives primarily from native colonial documents and manuscripts commissioned by the Spanish. The Maya mythology is far older, and our knowledge of it comes mainly from native manuscripts of the Classic period, over 600 years before the Spanish conquest. Drawing on these sources as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations and research, including the interpretation of the codices and the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, the author discusses, among other things, the Popol Vuh myths of the Maya, the flood myth of Northern Yucatan, and the Aztec creation myths.