Suchergebnisse

This article explores ways in which insights developed within the field of Jewish geography raise important challenges both for the general history of religions and for more tightly focused studies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sacred space and architecture. Of particular concern are the ways in which Jonathan Z. Smith's exposure of the serious limitations of applying Mircea Eliade's famous model of sacred space to the specifics of Jewish sacred geography give Americanist scholars pause to reconsider the application of those familiar Eliadean categories to the case of the Aztecs' main temple and ceremonial precinct.

For generations scholars have explained the marked difference in the ruins of Chichén Itzá by attributing the southern buildings to indigenous Yucatecan Maya and then telling of central Mexican Toltec invaders who built (or forced the Maya to build) the Tula‐like plaza to the north. But evidence now suggests that the infamous "Toltec conquest of the Maya" never happened. The story may actually be the manifestation of a Western tendency to express ambivalent attitudes toward Native Americans in terms of polar opposites, in this case, "gentle Maya priests" versus "brutal Mexican warriors." In the end, the story may reveal more about the Western politics of knowledge than about pre‐Columbian Mesoamerican history.