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  • Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley
  • John F. Schwaller
Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley. Edited and translated by Camilla Townsend, with an essay by James Lockhart. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. x, 212. Maps. Tables. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.

The study of colonial Nahuatl documentation continues to grow as scholars shift their focus to new types of materials. In this volume, Camilla Townsend has focused her attention on the genre of annals, the chronological listing of events. We know from existing documentation that this type of historical record was common prior to the arrival of the Spanish. In the sixteenth century many areas continued their tradition of annals and made the shift from glyphic writing to European script. Although Chimalpahin continued the tradition in the Valley of Mexico in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, by the seventeenth century only a very few places continued the annals tradition, one of the prime locations being the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. In this work Townsend translates, edits, and analyzes two annals: one from Tlaxcala, produced by Don Manuel de los Santos y Salazar, his family and circle; the other from Puebla, produced by Don Miguel de los Santos and his circle. The attributions are necessarily vague since no single individual claims authorship. The hand, grammar, perspective, and other patterns of communication shift across the years, indicating that several scribes participated, but in general all pertained to a closely knit social group affiliated with these principal characters.

The book consists of an introduction by Townsend, which analyzes the history of the region, the development of the annals genre, and how these two examples fit into it, also looking at other annals from the region. The Nahua called annals like these xiuhpoalli, or year counts. Normally in the glyphic writing each year would be indicated by its calendrical sign, and then the events of that year represented as a single glyph. The interpreter of the documents would use this as a mnemonic device to recall the fuller account. With the transition to European writing, the year sign gave way to Christian years, and the glyph gave way to a brief narrative on the events. The earliest dates in these annals were clearly copied from some prior source, possibly a glyphic account. In interpreting the older tradition sometimes the actual years would be written in error, confusing one date in the pre-Columbian system with an incorrect year in the Christian calendar. Townsend then goes on to look at the world in which the annals were written, studies the clues which point to their authorship, and discusses the technical issues related to the transcription of the original [End Page 288] manuscript. Her detective work in identifying the possible authors, or at least their circles, is fascinating and gives a great deal of richness to the accounts themselves. In brief, she also discusses some of the decisions that she made regarding the transcription of various terms and explanation of the social categories which appear in the works.

James Lockhart provides an introduction to the language of the texts, looking at how these examples fit into the schema that he and Frances Karttunen developed for Nahuatl language change in the contact period. In short, they are good representatives of documents from his Stage 3, and perhaps the largest single corpus of documents from that period. The two texts differ significantly in the presence, or absence, of loan words. The Tlaxcala document completely lacks loan verbs and loan particles, while the Puebla document manifests both. He also analyzes the markers of the particular variant of Nahuatl used in the annals, corroborating their origin in eastern Mexico. Lastly, he studies the vocabulary and the structure of discourse in the works.

The final section of the book contains the transcription and translation of the two annals. As is now customary, the original Nahuatl appears on the left-hand page, with the corresponding translation into English on the right. The documents are richly footnoted, helping to clarify the identity of specific individuals and to provide background to the events mentioned in...

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