The Aztec Calendar Stone

The Aztec Calendar Stone, edited by Khristaan D. Villela and Mary Ellen Miller and published by the Getty Research Institute in 2010, is an edited scholarly volume bringing together specialist essays on the famous Mexica sculpture, its iconography, its post-conquest burial and rediscovery, and the long history of its reinterpretation from the eighteenth century to the present. Its strength is that it gathers specialists in Mesoamerican art history and archaeology in one peer reviewed collection published by a major research institute, rather than presenting one author's single reading of a monument whose meaning has been argued over for centuries. Its limit is that, as with any edited symposium volume, individual essays can differ in their conclusions, so a specific interpretive claim about the stone's iconography should be attributed to the contributing scholar who makes it rather than to the volume as a whole.