CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - PATRICIA MURRIETA-FLORES Mesoamerican Apocalypse: A large scale analysis of the Indigenous perspective on the sixteenth-century epidemics of Colonial Mexico
In a critical intervention to the historiography of disease and epidemics during the Conquest of Mexico, this project will use new developments in Artificial Intelligence to carry out a large-scale analysis of sixteenth-century Spanish and Indigenous American sources. This research will expand our knowledge beyond the three well-known, extensively researched epidemics in New Spain. It will further challenge the longstanding assumption that it was mainly the conquest wars by the Spanish and their Indigenous allies that changed the population landscape. Analysing a vast corpus of primary sources, it will go beyond traditional historical scholarship, investigating the geographic distribution of the multiple epidemics that occurred in the sixteenth century. Through this project, we will better comprehend how Indigenous communities recorded, talked about, and confronted these devastating events. It will also map the disease landscape according to a large collection of colonial sources. In doing so, we will investigate how these events were regarded, and how ideas connected to the Nahua religious understanding of the 'cyclical end of the world' changed during the colonial period and in light of these epidemics.