Byron Ellsworth Hamann
Biographic Data
| ID | 151992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Byron Ellsworth Hamann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Byron Ellsworth |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamann |
| SIGNATURE | HAMANN B E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic
Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas
"Byron Ellsworth Hamann. Review of "Rarities of These Lands: "Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic" by Claudia Swan
Fieldnotes from Solaris: Ship's Logs, Shipwrecks, and Salt Water as Medium
December 20 2021 Fieldnotes from Solaris: Ship's Logs, Shipwrecks, and Salt Water as Medium Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Hamann holds a dual Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Chicago. His research is focused on the art and writing of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, as well as on the connections linking the Americas and Europe in the early modern Mediterratlantic world. He is currently a member of the School…
"Byron Ellsworth Hamann. Review of "Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: "The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade" by Meha Priyadarshini
Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico
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Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico
Titled in reference to the biblical story of how Christ's apostles received the gift of universal fluency, Tongues of Fire is the result of a four-decade research project on early modern evangelization in Oaxaca, Mexico. Intended as a Dominican-dominated complement to the Franciscan-focused works of Louise Burkhart on central Mexico and William Hanks on Yucatan, Farriss's book is constantly in dialogue with those other regions and studies, and of…
Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today's Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worl…
Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today’s Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worl…
Producing Idols
Idolatry is an accusation. Derived from ancient Greek terms for the veneration (latreia) of images (eidola), idolatry provides a framework for exploring the connections and confusions of the early modern Mediterratlantic world, where false images seemed to be everywhere. This essay surveys the social lives of idols in sixteenth-century New Spain, focusing on their destruction, creation, excavation, and commodification. Significantly, all four act…
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500." Colonial Latin American Review, 27(4), pp. 575–576
The Higa and the Tlachialoni: Material Cultures of Seeing in the Mediterratlantic
Comparison and Seeing in the Mediterratlantic
Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras
An Artificial Mind in Mexico City (Autumn 1559)
April 01 2017 An Artificial Mind in Mexico City (Autumn 1559) Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Ellsworth Hamann is an editor of Grey Room and Assistant Professor in the History of Art at Ohio State University. He is author of The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); codirector (with Liza Bakewell) of Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Cult…
Bruno Latour no jardim da ilustração arqueológica
Este ensaio explora uma técnica específica de ilustração utilizada por arqueólogos mesoamericanistas: o desenho linear e, particularmente, o método de combinar croquis de detalhes de grandes artefatos juntos em uma única página. O ensaio começa com o texto de Bruno Latour, intitulado "Drawing things together", no qual ele argumenta que boa parte da prática científica envolve "a transformação de ratos e substâncias químicas em papel". Através de r…
Counterfeit money, starring Patty Hearst
This essay explores non-monetary uses of money in the Pacific world circa 1800: the ways in which coins were used not as tokens of exchange, but as raw materials for artistic elaboration. Historically, to counterfeit did not necessarily have the negative forgery-falsification connotations that it has today. Counterfeiting could just mean copying; etymologically, counterfeit means 'to make in opposition or contrast.' Connecting Mexico to Manila to…
Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Indigenous Intellectuals is the product of two conferences. The first, in 2009 (at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting), explored the theme of Mexican and Andean indigenous intellectuals from the sixteenth century to the present. The second, in 2010 (at the University of Cambridge, home institution for editor Gabriela Ramos), centered the conversation on the past, on the first three centuries of European presence in the Americas. T…
How to chronologize with a hammer, Or, The myth of homogeneous, empty time
Modern Western temporality is often characterized (quoting Walter Benjamin) as "homogeneous, empty time." This temporality is said (in the influential works of Johannes Fabian and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example) to result from a process by which sacred Judeo-Christian time was secularized: beginning in the Renaissance and finally achieved by the Enlightenment. Taking Fabian and Trouillot as a point of departure, this essay considers the past…
Strange Lands and Different Peoples: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala
“Strange Lands and Different Peoples” centers on the sixteenth-century history of what is now the nation-state of Guatemala. It consists of 4 main sections followed by a 40-table appendix of statistical data. Parts 1 to 3 provide a chronological overview of Guatemalan history from 1522 to 1550; part 4 reconstructs three centuries of indigenous population history from 1520 to 1812. The volume is a timely and useful state-of-the-field overview. The…
Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico; After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730; Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos C…
Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico Edward W. Osowski Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010 xii, 260 pp. (ISBN: 9780816528554) After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self
Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala
Sacred Geography in the Nochixtlan Valley
The pages of the Mixtec screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful have been linked to specific locations on the ground. In this essay, I propose identifications for seven place signs which appear on pages 4 to 1 of theCodex Viennaand page 3 of theCodex Nuttall. I draw on five types of sources: testimonies from the 1544–1547 Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation, the pictorial records of the Mixtec screenfolds themselves, th…
La historia secreta de la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración, y resistencia maya (1879-1915)
Provocatively titled, La historia secreta presents a complex portrait of henequen production in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yucatán. Based on archival sources at the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán and the Simón Peón papers at the University of Texas– Arlington, Piedad Peniche Rivero brings together several different strategies of argumentation. Microhistorical treatments of individual court cases are joined with large-scal…
Rabinal Achi: A Fifteenth-Century Maya Dynastic Drama
Rabinal Achi is an English translation of Alain Breton’s 1994 French translation of and commentary on a Quiché-Achi Mayan drama still performed in the Guatemalan town of San Pablo Rabinal. The book consists of four main sections. The introduction explains the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of the two extant scripts of the drama, outlines what we know about the late pre-Hispanic historical period in which the drama is set, briefly sum…
Lord 8 Deer "Jaguar Claw" and the Land of the Sky: The Archaeology and History of Tututepec
This article balances current understandings of the political landscape of Postclassic Mesoamerica through a conjunctive analysis of the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Mixtec Empire of Tututepec in the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca. Tututepec has long been known from ethnohistoric sources as a powerful Late Postclassic imperial center. Until recently, however, little has been known of the archaeology of the site. We discuss the founding, …
Chronological Pollution: Potsherds, Mosques, and Broken Gods before and after the Conquest of Mexico
Mary Douglas defined "dirt" as matter out of place, but dirt can be matter out of time as well. This essay uses the concept of chronological pollution to interrelate times and places often categorized as separate: pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica; medieval Europe; and the Muslim, Christian, and Native American worlds of the sixteenth-century transatlantic
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Simon Varey. Rafael Chabrán. and Dora B. Weiner. eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xvi. 229 pp.The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Simon Varey. ed. Rafael Chabrán. Cynthia L. Chamberlin. and Simon Varey. trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xix. 281 pp
How to chronologize with a hammer, Or, The myth of homogeneous, empty time
Modern Western temporality is often characterized (quoting Walter Benjamin) as "homogeneous, empty time." This temporality is said (in the influential works of Johannes Fabian and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example) to result from a process by which sacred Judeo-Christian time was secularized: beginning in the Renaissance and finally achieved by the Enlightenment. Taking Fabian and Trouillot as a point of departure, this essay considers the past…
Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala
Counterfeit money, starring Patty Hearst
This essay explores non-monetary uses of money in the Pacific world circa 1800: the ways in which coins were used not as tokens of exchange, but as raw materials for artistic elaboration. Historically, to counterfeit did not necessarily have the negative forgery-falsification connotations that it has today. Counterfeiting could just mean copying; etymologically, counterfeit means 'to make in opposition or contrast.' Connecting Mexico to Manila to…
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500." Colonial Latin American Review, 27(4), pp. 575–576
Sacred Geography in the Nochixtlan Valley
The pages of the Mixtec screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful have been linked to specific locations on the ground. In this essay, I propose identifications for seven place signs which appear on pages 4 to 1 of theCodex Viennaand page 3 of theCodex Nuttall. I draw on five types of sources: testimonies from the 1544–1547 Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation, the pictorial records of the Mixtec screenfolds themselves, th…
"What Did Mesoamerican Commoners Think about "Pre-Sunrise Things
Myths of Ancient Mexico
The Myth of Quetzalcoatl
In 1957 Miguel Covarrubias published a now-famous diagram illustrating the evolution of Mesoamerican rain gods. Drawings of 20 faces from Pre-Columbian iconography were arranged in 4 columns and connected with arrows. Teotihuacano murals, Yucatec Maya stonework, and Aztec ceramics were all traced back to a carved Olmec celt. The three thousand years between the earliest and latest objects in this chart were unified by visual similarity, namely, d…
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Simon Varey. Rafael Chabrán. and Dora B. Weiner. eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xvi. 229 pp.The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Simon Varey. ed. Rafael Chabrán. Cynthia L. Chamberlin. and Simon Varey. trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xix. 281 pp
"What Did Mesoamerican Commoners Think about "Pre-Sunrise Things
Lord 8 Deer "Jaguar Claw" and the Land of the Sky: The Archaeology and History of Tututepec
This article balances current understandings of the political landscape of Postclassic Mesoamerica through a conjunctive analysis of the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Mixtec Empire of Tututepec in the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca. Tututepec has long been known from ethnohistoric sources as a powerful Late Postclassic imperial center. Until recently, however, little has been known of the archaeology of the site. We discuss the founding, …
Mesolore: Learning to think critically
"The "Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice
Chronological Pollution: Potsherds, Mosques, and Broken Gods before and after the Conquest of Mexico
Mary Douglas defined "dirt" as matter out of place, but dirt can be matter out of time as well. This essay uses the concept of chronological pollution to interrelate times and places often categorized as separate: pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica; medieval Europe; and the Muslim, Christian, and Native American worlds of the sixteenth-century transatlantic
Rabinal Achi: A Fifteenth-Century Maya Dynastic Drama
Rabinal Achi is an English translation of Alain Breton’s 1994 French translation of and commentary on a Quiché-Achi Mayan drama still performed in the Guatemalan town of San Pablo Rabinal. The book consists of four main sections. The introduction explains the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of the two extant scripts of the drama, outlines what we know about the late pre-Hispanic historical period in which the drama is set, briefly sum…
Sacred Geography in the Nochixtlan Valley
The pages of the Mixtec screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful have been linked to specific locations on the ground. In this essay, I propose identifications for seven place signs which appear on pages 4 to 1 of theCodex Viennaand page 3 of theCodex Nuttall. I draw on five types of sources: testimonies from the 1544–1547 Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation, the pictorial records of the Mixtec screenfolds themselves, th…
La historia secreta de la hacienda henequenera de Yucatán: Deudas, migración, y resistencia maya (1879-1915)
Provocatively titled, La historia secreta presents a complex portrait of henequen production in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yucatán. Based on archival sources at the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán and the Simón Peón papers at the University of Texas– Arlington, Piedad Peniche Rivero brings together several different strategies of argumentation. Microhistorical treatments of individual court cases are joined with large-scal…
Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico; After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730; Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain's Indian Pueblos C…
Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico Edward W. Osowski Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010 xii, 260 pp. (ISBN: 9780816528554) After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self
Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala
Strange Lands and Different Peoples: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala
“Strange Lands and Different Peoples” centers on the sixteenth-century history of what is now the nation-state of Guatemala. It consists of 4 main sections followed by a 40-table appendix of statistical data. Parts 1 to 3 provide a chronological overview of Guatemalan history from 1522 to 1550; part 4 reconstructs three centuries of indigenous population history from 1520 to 1812. The volume is a timely and useful state-of-the-field overview. The…
Counterfeit money, starring Patty Hearst
This essay explores non-monetary uses of money in the Pacific world circa 1800: the ways in which coins were used not as tokens of exchange, but as raw materials for artistic elaboration. Historically, to counterfeit did not necessarily have the negative forgery-falsification connotations that it has today. Counterfeiting could just mean copying; etymologically, counterfeit means 'to make in opposition or contrast.' Connecting Mexico to Manila to…
Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Indigenous Intellectuals is the product of two conferences. The first, in 2009 (at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting), explored the theme of Mexican and Andean indigenous intellectuals from the sixteenth century to the present. The second, in 2010 (at the University of Cambridge, home institution for editor Gabriela Ramos), centered the conversation on the past, on the first three centuries of European presence in the Americas. T…
How to chronologize with a hammer, Or, The myth of homogeneous, empty time
Modern Western temporality is often characterized (quoting Walter Benjamin) as "homogeneous, empty time." This temporality is said (in the influential works of Johannes Fabian and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example) to result from a process by which sacred Judeo-Christian time was secularized: beginning in the Renaissance and finally achieved by the Enlightenment. Taking Fabian and Trouillot as a point of departure, this essay considers the past…
Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras
An Artificial Mind in Mexico City (Autumn 1559)
April 01 2017 An Artificial Mind in Mexico City (Autumn 1559) Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Ellsworth Hamann Byron Ellsworth Hamann is an editor of Grey Room and Assistant Professor in the History of Art at Ohio State University. He is author of The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); codirector (with Liza Bakewell) of Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Cult…
Bruno Latour no jardim da ilustração arqueológica
Este ensaio explora uma técnica específica de ilustração utilizada por arqueólogos mesoamericanistas: o desenho linear e, particularmente, o método de combinar croquis de detalhes de grandes artefatos juntos em uma única página. O ensaio começa com o texto de Bruno Latour, intitulado "Drawing things together", no qual ele argumenta que boa parte da prática científica envolve "a transformação de ratos e substâncias químicas em papel". Através de r…
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500
Building Yanhuitlan. Art, politics, and religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500." Colonial Latin American Review, 27(4), pp. 575–576
The Higa and the Tlachialoni: Material Cultures of Seeing in the Mediterratlantic
Comparison and Seeing in the Mediterratlantic
Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today's Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worl…
Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today’s Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worl…
History (28 works) · Latin American history and culture (23 works) · Art (18 works) · Archaeology (14 works) · History (12 works) · Geography (10 works) · Art history (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works)