Since antiquity, time in the West has been represented in circular form, the gear wheels of time churning out duration in endless years. At the time of the Spanish conquest dials on round clock faces looked down from facades of cathedrals and town halls, their sonorous tones chiming out the hours that directed people’s religious and workaday lives. Since the Gregorian Calendar Reform coincided with the proliferation of the clock, the subject of time was very much on the minds of sixteenth-century scholars. To judge from the way Spanish chroniclers describe it, the circle was also the principle mode of temporal expression among the New World natives they sought to Catholicize. Anthony Aveni demonstrates that this was decidedly not the case. Rather, the indigenous quadripartite way of perceiving space rendered the expression of time to have been decidedly square.

Circling the Square: How the Conquest Altered the Shape of Time in Mesoamerica examines an array of calendar circles appearing in manuscripts from Central Mexico and the Maya area of Yucatan from the time of sixteenth-century contact up to the eighteenth century.

Dr. Aveni follows the gradual intrusion of Western calendrical particulars into the native format, such as the correspondence between the months and the phases of the moon, the base-twelve format of the divisions of the year and the zodiac, the wind compass, the Olympiad, the concept of the Jubilee, and the leap year. He offers insight into the tension in the first generation of native scribes after the conquest, who were working with radically different ways of knowing, between the imposed requirement to change the way they thought about time and the innate desire to preserve their heritage and their identity.

Anthony F. Aveni is the Robert B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy, Anthropology, and Native American Studies, serving appointments both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate University. He helped develop the field of archaeoastronomy. Dr. Aveni has taught at Colgate since 1963, and has served in visiting appointments at the University of South Florida, the University of Colorado, Tulane University, and the University of Padua (Italy).