Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Culture (review)

Mesolore is a multimedia exploration of indigenous Mesoamerican culture on two CD-ROM disks. The great majority of the material concerns precolumbian Mesoamerican culture. This offering must not be confused with the traditional historical overview, however, for here the reader encounters a significant number of primary documents and an important part of the history of scholarship in place of a single linear narrative. Among the most important primary documents are extensive sections of precolumbian and colonial codices in color reproduction, while a databank of over 150 articles and book chapters provides an extensive historiography. Audio and video clips of scholars explaining and debating certain fundamental aspects of Mesoamerican culture form the final category of materials.

The great advantages of the CD-ROM format over the traditional book are the amount of information that can be placed on one compact disk, the low cost of lush color production, and the ability to go beyond type and image to provide time-based media such as digital video, audio tracks, and so on. Mesolore wisely uses all of these advantages. With all this material at the fingertips of the student, Mesolore must really be judged on the way it organizes and deploys the material. At its best, Mesolore is able to introduce the student to several levels of Mesoamerican history with a few mouse clicks (and some careful reading on the part of the student). A typical exploration would go like this: the reader is consulting the introductory video in which Maarten Jansen (Professor, University of Leiden) is explaining the basics of reading the codices. From the video the reader may turn immediately to articles Jansen has written on this topic, reached easily from a menu that appears with the video. At any point in this investigation the reader may also consult reproductions of two codices, with helpful basic commentary and a searchable database of personages and motifs.

The limitation of Mesolore, and this is freely admitted throughout the work, is the concentration on the Postclassic (ca. A.D.900-1520) Mixteca area of Oaxaca for the bulk of the more in-depth examinations. Both the codices studied come from this area, as does the indigenous vocabulary, but this limitation allows the authors to explore the historical context of these primary materials much more fully. For example, the reader is prepared to read the Codex Selden through the digital re-creation of a sixteenth-century Spanish courtroom, with a discussion of the document's possible placement in such a context. The codices themselves are annotated through "mouse-over" descriptions as the cursor moves through the page. Although the information provided by such a technique is limited to a succinct description of the scene, this reviewer found the feature very helpful. More detailed information is provided by clicking on any figure, which brings up a description, as well as a database searchable by several attributes, including costume, name, and date associations.

Many of the quibbles this reviewer had with the disks were not related to the restricted time and place of the materials, but to the way those materials were related. The late-sixteenth-century Mixtec-language vocabulary is not well integrated into the fabric of other materials. All the important Mixtec terms are glossed and available to the reader at any time through a hypertext link elsewhere, making the vocabulary seem rather superfluous to all but the most specialized student. The corpus of articles on Mesoamerica requires an Internet connection, as the articles themselves are stored remotely with only the reference provided on the disks themselves. Each article is supplied with images, making downloads potentially burdensome for students without broadband access to the Internet. That said, this feature is still one of the most exciting for a teacher of Mesoamerican culture and history, for here is a major collection of articles covering most major Mesoamerican areas and research themes.

While there are several interesting...