Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The 1904 World Fair in St. Louis wrought a fundamental change in Pál Horti’s life. A trailblazer of Art Nouveau in Hungary, he was commissioned to design and build the Hungarian pavilion and to organize Hungary’s official exhibit at Saint Louis, where he first encountered pre-Columbian art and concluded that the ancestors of the Hungarians had to be related to the American indigenous peoples. His opinion was based on ideas popular in the second half of the 19th century. According to these ideas, the origins of the Hungarians were to be sought on other continents. That’s why Horti resolved after the World Fair to travel to Mexico and then on to Asia in order to explore the origins of Hungarians and their ancestors. In 1906, he crossed Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and on his three-month trip acquired various archaeological pieces and ethnographic objects. According to letters he wrote home, what he experienced mostly in Western Mexico convinced him that there existed some kinship between the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Hungarians.

Between 450 and 1120 AD, the populations living in the regions ofthe Sayula Basin and the Bolaños Canyon used Glycymeris gigantea as material for the manufacture of bracelets, taking advantage of the natural characteristics of its valves. The archaeological material is quite fragmented when it is found and, interestingly, we observed that new work had been undertaken by the craftsmen in order to recycle broken shells. The observation of the traces of the fabrication process allows us to identify the working techniques and propose a reconstruction of the operational sequence used to make both the bracelets and the recycled products. Determining the common methods and original procedures will allow us to approach the pre-Hispanic craftsmen’s behavior. Furthermore, it needs to be stated that little research has been conducted to date on the recycling of shell ornaments, mainly due to a lack of evidence.

El presente trabajo se enfoca en esclarecer el origen de las fechas mexicas del periodo de la Conquista española, demostrando que en ese momento no fueron registradas, son producto de una reconstrucción tardía ya en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI. A la vez plantea la reflexión de los enfoques históricos con que ha sido visto el tema, lo cual nos lleva también a aclarar las inconsistencias en autores modernos. El resultado cambia la dirección de las investigaciones y muchas conclusiones previas pues anula cualquier correlación derivada de la fecha 1-cohuatl 13 de agosto de 1521.

Existing analyses of a Tarascan (Purépecha) narrative contained in the Relación de Michoacán about a ballgame contest have focused only on the paradigmatic relations between the characters in this story. Additionally, these paradigmatic understandings of this particular ballgame narrative have only been formulated in coordination with what is known of characters in related stories that contain similar elements. Resulting interpretations based on the paradigmatic relations of characters within the story and comparison with other stories explain the meaning of the story as an allegory of celestial phenomena, as all other such stories have been interpreted. This article goes further than those studies by applying a syntagmatic approach that analyzes the sequential action and transformations of the story itself. Paradigmatic or symbolic meanings are incorporated within such an approach, with the recognition that such relations are the subject of transformation through the plot of the story. By using this method, I show that the total transformations of the story are best explained as an ‘anti-myth’. In an ‘anti-myth’, a foreign entity is explained as the opposite of some aspect of indigenous society. The ball game story in the Relación de Michoacán functions as an anti-myth because the remains of a dead ancestor are transformed into a deer that is a post hoc mythological precursor to the Spaniards’ horses. Through this transformation the horses, as fetishized vehicles and sources of Spanish power, are represented as the results of an indigenous failure to remember one’s ancestors which immediately precedes that transformation. The point of the story is revealed to be an effort to understand the nature of the Spaniards’ power, and to indigenize that power in order to reclaim it.

This article is part of an ongoing study on the edition and commentary of the Bribri documentation made by Walter Lehmann and his consultant Juan Salas in 1907-1908, the “Vokabularium der Bribri-Sprache”, which is preserved in a notebook in the library of the Iberoramerican Institute in Berlin (signature Y / 3009 [8]°). The text has been transcribed and edited and is presented together with a Spanish translation in the appendix to this volume. The study of the documentation establishes a graphematic equivalence for Lehmann’s phonetic alphabet and describes various phonetic-phonological traits observed in the vocabulary. The documentation and the research tradition in which it develops is contextualized in an earlier historical introduction through the most important early documentations of Bribri. Linguistic material found in this documentation is compared to both a modern description of the Bribri language and other early documentations (before 1907). It was possible to confirm some degree of phonological affinity between the documented form of the language and some other dialectal variant based on groups of phonetic-phonological traits verifiable in the early documentation and recurring in contemporary descriptions of diatopical variation. More data on the dialectal adscription of the language documented by Lehmann and other early researchers will emerge from a future analysis of the lexical corpus of the “Vokabularium”.

Between 1881 and 1882, the Italian naturalist Carlos L. Spegazzini (1858-1926) joined the Italo-Argentinian expedition led by Giacomo Bove to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. He collected Fuegian language materials near Ushuaia in 1882, some of which were later published in different publications. In this article, we present a manuscript entitled “Ona-Yahgna-Alacaluf vocabulary by Dr. Spegazzini” that was copied by Samuel Lafone Quevedo in 1899 and was found in his personal archive. It consists of 42 pages that include vocabulary and phrasal forms, mostly in three columns. Each contains data from the Ona, Yahgan and Alacaluf languages. We focus on the Ona data collected by Spegazzini, (which are actually not in Selknam but in Haush, the least known language of the Chonan linguistic family) which have remained unpublished until now, and considerably increase our knowledge of this language. A better knowledge of Haush will, in turn, expand the historical-comparative research into the Chonan languages as well as the study of loan words and other possible phenomena of linguistic diffusion among the indigenous languages of Tierra del Fuego.

During a train trip between the Paraguayan cities of Encarnación and Asunción in 1911, the German ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche collected a series of 17 riddles in Guarani and Spanish never published in his works. These materials, which to this day have remained in the form of handwritten notes, complement the texts already recorded in Adivinanzas rioplatenses (1911b), an essential work for the study of South American oral literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to analyze the repertoire of unpublished and handwritten Guarani riddles collected by the German ethnologist and to explore the ways in which these texts influenced the linguistic practices of the Guaraní-speaking population of Paraguay at the time. The importance of these texts lies in their particular rhetoric that combines the playful and the humorous and embodies a social discourse of the daily life of Paraguayan society at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ian Graham recorded and sketched two sawn-off fragments of a bas-relief carved with glyphic texts in an art gallery in New York City in 1971. Later, in 1974, he visited the site of El Temblor in Petén, Guatemala, where he discovered the remains of a damaged stela and could verify that the two fragments he had seen in the New York Gallery were from this looted monument, now known as the Temblor Stela 1. Both fragments were sold to private collections in the United States. The right-hand part of the stela had been given to a public museum in Durham, North Carolina, while the left-hand part was later found, and identified, in a public museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. We can now present the general and more recent history of this stela and its epigraphy thanks to present-day photographs and new line drawings. The aim of this contribution is to make this major Early Classic limestone sculpture available for further epigraphical and art historical studies.

Vilela is a severely endangered Argentine Chaco language without any certain genealogical affiliation. The discovery of two elderly members of the last generation of speakers at the end of the year 2003 opened up the possibility of adding to the still scarce documentation of this language and describing it in more depth, hence for contributing to the knowledge of the languages and peoples of the Chaco, their relationships, and contacts. This article focuses on the documentation of the Vilela language and its speakers that was recorded by eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. We first outline the history of the Vilela from the earliest mentions of this people in the sources to present times. We then present the texts recorded in the eighteenth century in the original orthographic representation and our tentative phonemic transcription, with interlinear glosses, Spanish translation, and comments. Lastly, we include two appendices, the first of which gathers all the words recorded over this period, indicating their sources and degree of recognition by present-day speakers, and the second of which is a key text of demographic information about the Vilela people at the time the Jesuits were driven out of the Americas.