oswaldo chinchilla
Department of Anthropology, Yale University
Pedro de Alvarado, Tonatiuh: Reconsidering apotheosis
Abstract:
In recent decades, historians have increasingly questioned traditional interpretations of the European encounters with indigenous peoples around the world, which tend to admit that the invaders were regarded as gods. Much debate has centered around the questions of whether the indigenous peoples of Mexico equated Hernán Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl, whether they regarded the Spaniards as superior beings with god-like powers, and whether that influenced their diplomatic and military responses to the invasion. In this talk, I reconsider those questions by focusing on Pedro de Alvarado, one of the captains in Cortés’s contingent, who later led the invasion of Guatemala and El Salvador. I explore the connotations of his Nahuatl nickname, Tonatiuh, which was also the name of the Nahua sun god. Was that nickname somehow imposed by the Spaniards or not? Was it significant to understand indigenous responses at the time of the invasion? Did it influence the ways in which indigenous peoples of Mexico and Guatemala described Alvarado and interpreted his actions in later accounts?
Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, who received his PhD from Vanderbilt University, is Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. His research interests include Mesoamerican religion, art, and writing, the study of ancient urbanism and social complexity with a special focus on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, and the history of archaeology in Guatemala. In 2011, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Cotzumalhuapa art and archaeology. His books, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya (Yale), published in 2017, and Imágenes de la Mitología Maya (U. Francisco Marroquín), published in 2011, offer innovative views and methodological breakthroughs in the study of ancient Maya religion and art. He is the author of Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (Harvard), published in 2018, Cotzumalguapa, la Ciudad Arqueológica: El Baúl-Bilbao-El Castillo (F & G Editores), published in 2012, editor of Arqueología Subacuática: Amatitlán, Atitlán (U. Francisco Marroquín), published in 2011, and co-editor of The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing (U. Oklahoma), published in 2001, and The Technology of Maya Civilization: Political Economy and Beyond in Lithic Studies (Routledge), published in 2011.