Going Up, Coming Down: Verticality, Ruins, and Time in Postclassic Mixtec Landscapes and Painted Books
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article focuses on the placement of ruins in the Mixtec landscape and in painted screen-fold manuscripts or codices during the Late Postclassic period, with an eye toward shedding light on broader Mesoamerican dynamics. I argue that while ruins of previous ages constituted meaningful links to the past in and of themselves, much of their significance, or even “vibrancy,” in the Postclassic inhered from the processes of persons journeying to and from them across the landscape. In the highly mountainous terrain of the Mixtec highlands, this movement frequently involved dramatic vertical ascents and descents, a phenomenon accentuated in the surviving codices from the region. Drawing from archaeological, textual, and iconographic evidence, I argue that this vertical movement to and from ruins of the past was closely intertwined with Mesoamerican understandings of temporality, and that traversing up and down the landscape could effectively constitute a kind of movement through time. Consistent with our grasp of Mesoamerican temporalities more generally, these spatiotemporal movements should not be seen as linear or teleological but instead as largely cyclical and bound up with concerns surrounding cosmic renewal.
Source: Latin American Antiquity
Author: Jamie Forde
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7141669401