Notes on Contributors
Frances F. Berdan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. A specialist in Aztec and early colonial Mexican culture, she has authored, co-authored or co-edited thirteen books and more than a hundred articles. Her books include the four-volume Codex Mendoza (1992) and most recently, Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory (Cambridge University Press).
Leonardo López Luján is a Mexican archaeologist and the current director of the Templo Mayor project of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from Mexico’s National School of Anthropology and History and a doctorate from France’s Université de Paris Nanterre. He specializes in the politics, religion, and art of Pre-Columbian urban societies in Central Mexico. He is correspondent member of the British Academy and honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 2015 he received the Shanghai Forum Archaeology Award as the director of one of the ten best archaeological research programs in the world.
Laura Filloy Nadal has a BA in Art Conservation from Mexico’s School of Conservation (Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía), and an MA and PhD in archaeology from the Université Paris I-Sorbonne. She has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University and at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, as well as a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza, and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has collaborated on various research projects and in the restoration of delicate ancient Mexican feather artwork, and is currently a professor at the Escuela Nacional de Conservación and senior conservator at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, both in Mexico City.
María Olvido Moreno Guzmán has after completing her BA with a thesis on feather art, and an MA in museum studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana with a work entitled ‘Enchantment and Disenchantment: Public Reaction to Museum Reproductions’, obtained a doctorate in art history at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam) in Mexico City. From 2010 to 2012 she served on an Austrian-Mexican interdisciplinary team charged with studying and restoring the famous Feather Headdress of Motecuhzoma. She currently coordinates the ‘Pre-Hispanic Mural Painting in Mexico’ project at unam’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, while conducting research concerning the representation of feathers on walls.
Raul Macuil Martínez obtained his undergraduate degree in history at Universidad Autonoma de Tlaxcala, where he met his teacher and mentor, Luis Reyes García. Under his tutorship, Macuil wrote the thesis titled ‘La pasión de Tlatlauhquitepec: obra de teatro tlaxcalteca en náhuatl del siglo xvi’ (The Passion of Tlatlauhquitepec, a sixteenth-century Nahuatl play). As an undergraduate, he took classes in colonial Nahuatl palaeography and translation with Professor Luis Reyes García and began researching the documentary history of the Nahua peoples of Tlaxcala. Soon after, he became an assistant to Luis Reyes García at the University, from 1998 until Reyes’ death in 2004. Macuil obtained his PhD in archaeological in the project ‘Time in Intercultural Context: the indigenous calendars of Mexico and Guatemala’, funded by the European Research Council (erc). He performed fieldwork in the Nahua community of Santa Catarina (Hidalgo) and the communities in Tlaxcala and Puebla, and also investigated the local archives in the state of Tlaxcala.
Jorge Gómez-Tejada obtained his PhD in History of Art from Yale University in 2012. He is currently part of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Gómez-Tejada is specialised in early colonial Mexican art and is the editor of a new facsimilar edition of the Codex Mendoza in collaboration with several notable scholars of Pre-Hispanic and Early Modern art. This two-volume edition will come out in 2018.
Chiara Grazia is a Post-Doctoral fellow at the University of Perugia. In 2015 she was awarded a PhD in Chemical Sciences – Environmental and Cultural Heritage Chemistry, with a dissertation titled ‘Through the shades of time, from Pre-Columbian to Contemporary art: application of UV-vis-NIR reflectance and fluorescence spectroscopy to understand painting materials’. From 2009, she has been joining the international activities of the molab mobile laboratory inside the European Projects charisma and iperion CH in collaboration with the cnr-istm and the Centre of Excellence SMAArt of the University of Perugia. She is an expert of non-invasive analytic methodologies for in-situ diagnostic of cultural heritage, with a particular focus on the application of reflectance and fluorescence spectroscopies.
David Buti has a PhD in Conservation Science at the University of Florence, in collaboration with the cnr-istm and the Centre of Excellence SMAArt of the University of Perugia. From 2014 he has been a researcher in Conservation Science at the Center for Art Technological Studies and Conservation (cats) at the National Gallery of Denmark. He is specialized in manuscripts, with a practical experience in using different spectroscopic techniques aimed at identifying their constituent materials. Furthermore, after having joined cats, he had the opportunity to investigate several other kinds of artworks (old masters, modern and contemporary), extending his competences and deepening his knowledge mainly focused on manuscripts, also to sculpture, easel and mural paintings.
Laura Cartechini received her PhD in Chemistry in 1998. She is currently researcher at the cnr Institute of Molecular Science and Technologies (istm) in Perugia, Italy. Her research activity is focused on the investigation of heritage materials and on the understanding of their degradation processes by means of non-invasive spectroscopic techniques integrated with micro-destructive studies based both on conventional and advanced analytical methodologies.
Francesca Rosi received her PhD in Chemical Sciences from the Università Degli Studi di Perugia, Italy, in 2005. She is currently a researcher at cnr-istm in Perugia. Her research interests include the application and development of non-invasive and portable spectroscopic techniques for studying materials of interest in the field of cultural heritage. She is author of more than 30 scientific papers.
Francesca Gabrieli received her PhD in Chemical Sciences applied to cultural heritage study from the Università Degli Studi di Perugia, Italy, in 2015. She focalized her study on the understanding of art materials using vibrational spectroscopies (ftir, Raman, sers), both portable and not portable. She is now doing postdoc research at the National Gallery of art of Washington DC, usa, with an advanced training fellowship in imaging science. She is using xrf and reflectance imaging spectroscopies for the identification and mapping of art materials, working in a strong collaboration with conservators and curators.
Virginia M. Lladó-Buisán is the Head of Conservation and Collection Care at the Bodleian Libraries. She has been working in the Conservation field since 1990, having specialised in the conservation of works of art on paper and the technical study of artists’ materials and techniques. Since 2012, Virginia has collaborated with various experts on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Conservation Science, in order to advance the scientific study of Mexican manuscripts in the Bodleian collections. As a result of this work, she organised the conference ‘Mesoamerican manuscripts: new scientific approaches and interpretations’, Weston Library, Oxford, 31st May to 1st June 2016, as well as the first exhibition of the Bodleian codices together known to date.
Davide Domenici is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna (Italy), where he teaches Native American Art and Culture, Indigenous Civilizations of the Americas, and Historical Anthropology. As an archaeologist, he directed the Río La Venta Archaeological Project, Chiapas, Mexico (1998-2010), and The Cahokia Project, Illinois, usa (2011-2017). He is currently working on the cultural biographies of Mexican artifacts collected in Early Modern Europe, as well as on food-related information as it was recorded in 16th-century Mexican colonial sources. Since 2007, in collaboration with the molab Mobile Laboratory, he has been working on the identification – by means of non-destructive techniques – of painting materials used on pre-Hispanic and early colonial Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts.
Antonio Sgamellotti is Professor Emeritus of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Perugia. Member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Member of the Committees on ‘International Affairs’ and on ‘Cultural Heritage’ of the Accademia dei Lincei. Doctor Honoris Causa, unsam University Buenos Aires Co-founder and honorary President of the Centre of Excellence SMAArt ‘Scientific Methodologies applied to Archaeology and Art’. Co-founder of the MObile LABoratory, molab, for non-invasive in situ investigations on artworks. Author of about 350 scientific publications in international journals concerning advanced computations on chemistry, electronic and structural properties of molecules and inorganic materials, spectroscopic properties and characterization of archaeological and art-historical artefacts.
Aldo Romani is Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology of the University of Perugia. Research activity concerns both basic and applied subjects principally involving characterization of the molecular excited states by means of the parameters that govern their radiative and non-radiative processes using spectroscopic techniques in absorption and emission. The same techniques were applied, for non-destructive diagnostic purposes, in the field of the cultural heritage. From 2015 he is the President of the Excellence Centre SMAArt (Scientific Methodologies Applied to Archaeology and Art). He is the author of more than 150 papers in international journals and 7 books chapters.
Costanza Miliani is senior researcher at cnr‐istm, Perugia, Italy. She received her MSc (1995) and PhD (1999) in Chemical Sciences at the Università Degli Studi di Perugia. She is the author of over 120 articles concerning the structural, electronic and vibrational properties of materials of relevance to heritage science (H‐index=38 from Google Scholar). CM is currently the coordinator of the mobile platform molab operating in Europe under the iperionch project. She is a member of the board of the Centre SMAArt (Scientific Methodologies applied to Archaeology and Art, Perugia) and the scientific board of nuaccess of the Art Institute and Northwestern University of Chicago.
María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria is an art historian (enah/unam) who does research and teaches Mesoamerican art. Her specific area of expertise is the study of Mesoamerican codices and the Mixteca-Puebla Stylistic and Iconographic Tradition (ad 1350–1521), its origins, development, stylistic varieties, as well as the political configuration of central and southern Mesoamerica. Her line of research is aimed at defining pictorial schools of this period in the historical context of the Postclassic period. Her research on original codices, both pre-Hispanic and colonial, has been conducted in European and Mexican collections. She is a member of diverse interdisciplinary research groups; she has coordinated publications, academic encounters, and has participated in projects related to spreading awareness of Mesoamerican art.
Alessia Frassani received a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; MA in Archaeology and History of Native American Peoples at Leiden University; and BA in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna. Between 2010 and 2013, she was assistant professor in the Art Department of the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. Her monographs on the town and convento of Santo Domingo Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca, have been published in Spanish Artistas, mecenas y feligreses en Yanhuitlán, Mixteca Alta, siglos xvi–xxi (Ediciones Uniandes/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, unam, 2017) and in English Building Yanhuitan: Art, Politics, and Religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).
Araceli Rojas Martínez Gracida is a Visiting Fellow in the International Research Consortium ‘Fate, Freedom and Prognostication. Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe’ at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany. From 2012 until 2017, she was Lecturer and Assistant Professor in the faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University, the Netherlands. She specializes in the study of codices, calendars, divination, decolonial methodologies and water management of Oaxaca and Central Mexico. She dedicates herself also to recovering and restoring the legacy of historian Manuel Martínez Gracida. In 2013, her PhD dissertation won her the Best Investigation of the Original Peoples of Oaxaca which lead to the publication in 2014 of El tiempo y la sabiduría: un calendario sagrado entre los ayöök de Oaxaca. This book is a documentation of the on-going use of a 260-day calendar among the Ayöök (Mixe) people of Oaxaca, along with its associations with ritual, worldview, divination and sacred narratives.
Paul van den Akker started his research ‘Time, History and Ritual in a K’iche’ community’ in 2013 as a PhD-student of the ‘Time in Intercultural Context’ research group under the supervision of prof. dr. M.E.R.G.N. Jansen. In 2018 he obtained his doctorate title at the Leiden University. His anthropological fieldwork in the Highland Guatemala town of Momostenango is geared towards understanding contemporary ritual practices related to the K’iche’ Maya calendar. Being interested in the interconnectedness between archaeology, anthropology and the struggle for the implementation of indigenous rights, Van den Akker works with several calendar specialists and is actively involved in cultural regeneration projects in Guatemala.
Manuel May Castillo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Archäologie und Kulturanthropologie de la Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany. He was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Archaeology, Department of Heritage of Indigenous Peoples, Leiden University, from 2015 to 2017 and wrote his doctoral dissertation on cultural landscapes and Mayan architecture, at the University of Valencia, Spain in 2014. He is a Maya academic whose work focuses on heritage and rights of Indigenous Peoples, neocolonialism, transnationalism and Indigenous movements in Mexico and Guatemala. His research aligns with post-colonial and decolonizing studies while exploring the role of Maya heritage in the formation of contemporary society, both locally and globally.
Omar Aguilar Sánchez is a researcher belonging to the Mixtec People or Ñuu Savi People (People or Nation of the Rain), one of the Indigenous Peoples of southern Mexico. He is an archaeologist at the National School of Anthropology and History (México). Recipient of a special recognition (Honorific Mention) of the Prize ‘Alfonso Caso’ of the Annual National inah Awards 2016 for best Licenciatura dissertation in Archaeology. Currently, Aguilar is a PhD candidate in the Sustainable Humanities Program, Faculty of Archaeology and Faculty of Humanities (Leiden University). His PhD research focuses on understanding the symbolic stratigraphy of the land (through time) from the worldview of the People of the Rain, by studying contemporary cultural heritage in communities of the Mixtec Highlands. Aguilar has attended and give lectures in international congresses in America and Europe. Since 2014 he has also given lectures to the civil society, authorities and students of the communities of Ñuu Savi to disseminate his results as part of his commitment to his people, culture and language. Aguilar has published three academic articles in Spanish and he has collaborated in four Europeans projects.
Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen is Professor of Heritage of Indigenous Peoples at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is author of many studies about ancient Mexican art and history. In recent years he directed the research projects ‘Time in Intercultural Context: the Indigenous Calendars of Mexico and Guatemala’ (advanced grant from the European Research Council) and ‘Shedding light on endangered mutual heritage. Developing non-invasive imaging techniques to uncover, understand and preserve ancient Mexican pictorial manuscripts’ (Science4Arts grant from nwo, the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research).
Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez is an advocate of indigenous rights and a researcher of the Mixtec language and culture, affiliated with the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. She has published a coursebook and a dictionary of Sahin Sau, the Mixtec language, and co-authored several commentaries on ancient pictorial manuscripts as well as other books and articles on ancient Mixtec history.
Tim Zaman obtained his MSc. from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. After this, he became a PhD researcher at the same university, specialising in the development of imaging techniques for application on objects of cultural heritage. He formed part of the core research team of the Science4Arts research project ‘Shedding Light’. Recently he has shifted his focus to the development of Artificial Intelligence and its potential application for autonomous vehicles.
David Howell, Acr was appointed Head of Heritage Science at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, in March 2012, having joined in November 2004, first as Head of Preventive Conservation, and from 2006 Head of Conservation and Collection Care. He has been in the conservation profession for nearly 35 years and prior to his work at the Bodleian he worked on a number of conservation research projects for Historic Royal Palaces (Hampton Court Palace, Tower of London, Kensington Palace) while at the same time co-establishing Hanwell Monitors, the heritage environmental monitoring system. David has served as a trustee to both the Institute of Conservation and the UK’s National Heritage Science Forum.
Ludo Snijders received a PhD in Archaeology from Leiden University in 2016. This research was funded by the nwo Science4Arts program. He has since worked in the erc project ‘Time in Intercultural Context’ and has received funding from the Slicher van Bath-De Jong foundation to continue his research. His research has focused on the Mesoamerican codices from the perspective of cultural biography. Through experimental replication, study of written sources and the application of high-tech investigation methods he has attempted to uncover the major moments of transformation in the history of these objects. The results have been presented not only in scientific papers and monographs, but also through museum exhibits and videos.
Rosemary Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, received her PhD from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985. A curator and faculty member at Harvard University from 1985 to 1994, she moved to Berkeley in 1994, and served as Director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology until 1999. She began participating in archaeological fieldwork in Honduras as an undergraduate in 1977, and co-directed projects on early village life, the Classic period, and the colonial and Republican periods. While collaborating in research in the western Maya area with Mexican colleagues, she continues research on Honduran collections in museums.