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Most preserved Mesoamerican texts are on durable materials that could survive centuries of exposure to the tropical climate. Carved stone monuments are the largest group of objects with written texts known (Chapter 13). Texts were also recorded on the painted walls of buildings and tombs, with examples surviving from the Maya lowlands, Oaxaca, and Teotihuacan. The content of texts that have been interpreted deals with political events such as warfare, records of succession in office, visits between rulers of different sites, and the birth, maturation, death, and burial of members of the ruling nobility. This subject matter is consistent with their monumental scale and location in places of assembly within site centers. The inclusion in many of these public monuments of records of ceremonies, including sacrifices, visions, and dedications of buildings and monuments, has led scholars to see service as ritual specialists as a fundamental role of governing groups throughout Mesoamerica’s history.

Texts have also been recorded carved or painted on pottery vessels and other portable objects, including metal, bone, jade, and other stone ornaments. The texts on many such objects include references to the same kinds of ceremonies and public actions mentioned on monuments. They can be understood as recording histories on objects that circulated as heirlooms, connecting nobles across generations (Joyce 2000b).

Manuscripts on bark paper and deerskin written in the Postclassic period have been preserved from both the Maya lowlands and Mexican highlands. The majority, such as the histories conserved in Mixtec codices (Chapter 10), include content similar to that of earlier public monuments. Some Postclassic books include material not represented in monuments, such as records of astronomical observations and what appear to be almanacs for use in carrying out rituals or divination. Images on Classic Maya pottery vessels depict what appear to be fan-fold books very much like the surviving Postclassic codices, but no Classic Maya manuscripts have survived in legible condition.

The range of topics covered by known written texts is skewed toward matters of public governance and ceremony. Allusions to the deeds of supernatural beings in the far distant past in Classic Maya monumental inscriptions suggest that written books might have contained narratives of origins, as did the texts created by lowland and highland Maya during the colonial period. It is also likely that lost perishable texts recorded economic information. These might have resembled tribute lists that were created in a hybrid style in Central Mexico after the Spanish Conquest to represent the economic relations of the Mexica empire.

It is indisputable that one way that Mesoamerican structures were reproduced over time, including after Spanish colonization, was through the reproduction in texts of immense amounts of historical knowledge. Mesoamerican societies were not only literate; they were self-consciously historical, invoking precedents from the past as grounds for present action. Mesoamerican historical traditions of the sixteenth century were varied, and each had distinctive features.

The histories recorded in Postclassic codices and colonial texts like the Books of Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh contain records that can be related to archaeologically documented events (Chapters 10 and 11). Many Mesoamerican historical texts contain descriptions of earlier idyllic societies, often credited with founding institutions such as the calendar or with inventing crafts and social institutions. The Mexica identified these innovators as the Toltecs, the people of a great city-state called Tollan.

Apparent references to prestigious Toltec predecessors of Postclassic city-states are part of historical traditions throughout Mesoamerica. Archaeologists have long identified these traditions with an archaeological site north of the Basin of Mexico, Tula, Hidalgo, but there is relatively little evidence that this site had the kind of impact across Mesoamerica necessary to inscribe itself in the historical imagination as a kind of Rome (Gillespie 1989).

Originally, Mexican archaeologists identified Teotihuacan as the historical model for Tula in Central Mexico, and a possible candidate for Tollan in historical accounts. Teotihuacan was the first great city-state to have an effect on political affairs over an area reaching to the ends of eastern and western Mesoamerica (see Chapters 4 and 5). It is possible that there were multiple models for the Toltecs of Postclassic historical tradition. In the Postclassic Maya lowlands, Chichen Itza may have had the same kind of reputation that Teotihuacan had in Central Mexico, as a city much more powerful than any that followed in the late historic period.

Postclassic Mesoamerican historical traditions traced innovations in governance to legendary cities whose most likely models flourished in the Classic period. The peoples of the Classic period who left recorded traditions of history linked their rulers to supernatural beings active in the first days of time, before the sun rose, when the world was dark. The same imagery is found in post-conquest histories, many of which describe times before the calendar was in use, before the sun rose for the first time. The most elaborate of these postconquest traditions detail cycles of creation and destruction of the world and living beings before their current era. These traditions are not segregated from the histories of the first great city-states or from the detailed records of the actions of particular noble and ruling families. They testify to a broadly shared sense of Mesoamerican history.

In that broad Mesoamerican historical imagination, common history began when time could be counted with the calendar. The deeds of early heroes and gods prepared the way for human beings. Human beings created great cities which were destroyed, from which the later peoples dispersed. Individual royal and noble histories were validated by connection to these great city-states. Specific local events, institutions, and practices were linked to earlier times. Mesoamerican people practiced “indigenous archaeologies” to collect materials from earlier times, with Olmec objects employed by Classic and Postclassic Maya and at Tenochtitlan (Hamann 2002; Joyce 2000b). The histories archaeologists must reconstruct from fragments were known to and valued by Mesoamerican peoples, who conserved knowledge to the present day.

Mathematical and calendrical knowledge represented in indigenous writing crosses distinct language boundaries, persists from early in the history of recognizably Mesoamerican societies, and is still in use today, despite five centuries of colonization. The persistence of these practices was not automatic; it came about through learning by new practitioners, supported by the value placed on this knowledge by other members of Mesoamerican societies. The practices that the calendar and mathematics enabled reproduced not only knowledge of how to record time and quantities of things but also understandings of the orderly progress of time, of the repetition of cycles, of change and continuity. These concepts became part of a way of viewing the world, reproducing that way of viewing the world as numbers and dates were produced. The same is true of other features that early anthropologists suggested defined a Mesoamerican cultural area, when they are viewed as historically reproduced practices.