Davide Domenici- Professor (Associate) at University of Bologna
Davide Domenici
- Professor (Associate) at University of Bologna
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62
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Introduction
I have been working as an archaeologist in various places in Peru, Easter Island, Mexico and US. I have directed archaeological projects in Selva El Ocote (Chiapas, Mexico) and Cahokia (Illinois, USA). In recent years I have been working on a long term project of non-invasive chemical analyses of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerican codices. I'm currently studying the history of early modern Italian and European collecting of Mesoamerican artifacts.
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Publications
Publications (62)
Check out the second issue of Aldrovandiana for 2024, featuring intriguing articles on Ulisse Aldrovandi and Indigenous American featherwork, as well as insights into Passerotti and Aldrovandi's depictions of "men-beasts." We also explore Luigi Paolucci's "L’ordine e il metodo" from 1904 with a detailed edition, study, and commentary.
In a path-breaking volume published in 1972, Alfred Crosby coined the expression the “Columbian Exchange” to refer to the global circulation of people, animals, plants, and microbes initiated by the European “discovery” of America, an historical phenomenon which shaped the modern world in a radical and unprecedented way. In this chapter, I review t...
El Cardenal Flavio Chigi (1631-1693), sobrino del pontífice Alejandro VII (Fabio Chigi), fue un importante coleccionista de arte en la Roma del siglo xvii. Entre sus colecciones, se encontraba el Museo delle curiosità naturali, peregrine e antiche, en donde el cardenal recogió antigüedades, especímenes naturalísticos y objetos de procedencia extrae...
La relación entre expresiones pictóricas y correspondientes enunciaciones orales es un tema ampliamente debatido en los estudios mesoamericanos, en donde la discusión se ha centrado mayoritariamente sobre los códices posclásicos y coloniales. Buscando profundizar el horizonte cronológico de este tipo de estudios, el presente artículo discute alguna...
This consists of short biographies of deceased scholars Joerg Haeberli, Laura Laurencich Minelli, Ursula Wagner, Nancy Ellen Kirkhuff Porter, Billie Jean Isbell, Lynn Ann Meisch, and Bernard White Bell Jr.
The present volume departs from both early and recent findings on the materiality, historical
context, and circulation of the Codex Mendoza, as well from previous understandings of
its contents, priorities, and reception. In doing so, the authors seek to contribute to the
aggregate of identities that historians have created for the Codex Mendoza, w...
Domenici, D. & Marchetti, N. (eds.), Urbanized Landscapes in Early Syro-Mesopotamia and Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Papers of a Cross-Cultural Seminar held in Honor of Robert McCormick Adams, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag pp. 9 – 11.
The Friedenstein Palace in Gotha, Germany, holds a Late Postclassic Mesoamerican bird head sculpture made of wood encrusted with precious stone and shell mosaic. Although known since the nineteenth century, scholars have not given the artifact the attention it deserves. Based on observations made during a thorough in situ inspection, we provide a d...
Building on Jane Hill's seminal article (Hill 1992), various contributors to this volume stress that Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and the Southwest did not, and still do not, conceive of flower world(s) as symbolic or metaphorical entities, as products of human imagination. Rather, flower worlds are conceived as actual dimensions of reality th...
This article presents a pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican greenstone sculpture, formerly held in the collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and recently rediscovered by the author in the storerooms of the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna. After a discussion of Aldrovandi’s general attitude towards natural and cultural specimens from the New World, th...
The article focuses on the Mesoamerican mosaics proceeding from early European collections. Combining stylistic and iconographic observations with provenance, it defines two previously unrecognized stylistic groups, with no clear parallels in the extant archaeologically-excavated corpus, and proposes that their existence within the early European c...
The article illustrates the MOLAB research project devoted to the non-invasive investigation of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerican manuscripts. In the present paper, we provide a description of the project and its aims, listing the artworks so far investigated and describing analytical techniques we employed. A presentation of the data obtained...
Abstract Maya blue is a hybrid pigment where an organic component, indigo, is incorporated in a porous clay. Despite its widespread use in the Mesoamerican artistic production and numerous studies devoted to understand the type of interactions between indigo and the host framework, its technology has not been completely unravelled yet. In this stud...
The performance of non-invasive chemical analyses on various pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican codices to chemically characterize their painting materials has recently opened new avenues into research on the ancient Mesoamerican book painting tradition. In this chapter, a comparative effort is undertaken in order to shed light on the technological relation...
Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice. VERA TIESLER and ANDREW K. SCHERER, editors. 2018. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC. viii + 471 pp. $ 75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-88402-426-2. - Volume 30 Issue 1 - Davide Domenici
In 2010 the “Traditional Mexican cuisine” has been inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, in this way becoming the first national cuisine to obtain such recognition. Nevertheless, the process leading to the successful inscription on the list has not been an easy one, since an earlier Mexican candidacy had b...
Las excavaciones arqueológicas llevadas a cabo por el Proyecto Arqueológico Río La Venta en la Selva El Ocote, Chiapas, han permitido investigar varios baños de vapor en sitios zoques fechados entre el Clásico Tardío-Terminal y el Posclásico Tardío; entre ellos destaca un monumental baño de vapor rectangular del periodo Clásico Tardío-Terminal, ubi...
In the present article we provide a detailed description and interpretation, accompanied by new high-resolution photos, of one of the two Mesoamerican wooden mosaic-covered objects held by the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. In the first part of the text we offer a reconstruction of the object’s collection history, arguing that it could hav...
Here, we report on the analytical findings and their cultural implications of a multidisciplinary study of the pre-Columbian Codex Fejérváry-Mayer. Today conserved at the World Museum in Liverpool, it is one of the finest Mesoamerican codices among the few extant. Thanks to the exploitation of non-invasive analytical methodologies accessible throug...
This article discusses the Descrittione dell'India occidentale, a neglected Italian sixteenth-century anonymous and undated text that describes a set of Mesoamerican artifacts brought from Mexico to Italy by an anonymous priest. The text contains data on Mesoamerican material culture, on its Italian reception, and on its contribution to the formati...
The paper examines the various forms in which the memory of the Spanish conquest has been materialized and signified in the monuments of Mexico City, formerly the capital of both the Aztec empire and the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Looking at how the memory of the Conquest was settled in the “mnemonic landscape” of the city can reveal the identity st...
The article presents new data on the history of a Mesoamerican musical instrument, which is a notched human bone used as a friction idiophone, today, held at the Pigorini Museum in Rome, Italy, where it is recorded as MNPE n. 4209. The documentary data allow for the reconstruction of the instrument’s cultural biography along a time span of almost f...
The paper presents a cultural-historical interpretation of the data deriving from scientific analyses carried by the mobile laboratory MOLAB (SMAArt, University of Perugia-CNR) carried out on Mesoamerican manuscripts, providing hints on pictorial techniques and on the relationships between technological traditions and linguistic, stylistic and them...
Davide Domenici: Disentangling Knots. Real and fictional khipu systems in the Naples documents, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios, Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica, and Raimondo De Sangro’s Lettera apologetica The present paper offers a new critical approach to the so-called Naples documents, a group of controversial manuscripts that contain unprecede...
In this article we identify the Dominican Domingo de Betanzos as the anonymous bearer of a rich gift of Mexican objects and codices offered in Bologna to Pope Clement VII (1533), as recorded in the Historie di Bologna (1548) of the Bolognese Dominican Leandro Alberti. Joining this information with additional descriptions of another gift that Betanz...
In the following chapter we discuss the archaeological remains from Cueva del Lazo (Chiapas, Mexico), a ritual precinct that yielded a group of 11 Late-Terminal Classic children's partially mummified remains. Uncommon and rich contextual information, mainly derived from the exceptional preservation of perishable materials due to the dry climate of...
In this article we identify the Dominican Domingo de Betanzos as the anonymous bearer of a rich gift of Mexican objects and codices offered in Bologna to Pope Clement VII (1533), as recorded in the Historie di Bologna (1548) of the Bolognese Dominican Leandro Alberti. Joining this information with additional descriptions of another gift that Betanz...
La excavación de la Cueva del Lazo (Ocozocoautla, Chiapas), en el área zoque del oeste de Chiapas, sacó a la luz un contexto del Clásico Tardío compuesto por once entierros de niños asociados a una gran cantidad de materiales perecederos, entre ellos muchos textiles. Si bien el análisis físicoantropológico no ha detectado huellas que indiquen la c...
The excavation of the Cueva del Lazo (Ocozocoautla, Chiapas), in the Zoque region of Western Chiapas, brought to light a Late Classic context composed by eleven child burials, associated with a huge amount of perishable materials, including textiles. Despite the fact that the bioanthropological analysis didn't detected any evidence of violent death...
Matos Moctezuma Eduardo, Messico. La scoperta del passato, (Corpus Precolombiano, Jaca Book, Milano, 2010, 386 pp. ISBN 9788816604360)
di Davide Domenici
Il volume contiene una serie di testi concernenti lo studio dei Documenti Miccinelli, una serie di manoscritti relativi alla storia del Perù coloniale e alla figura del gesuita Blas Valera.
Extensive excavations at a three-temple complex at Teotihuacan (Central Mexico), located inmediately west of the Pyramid of the Moon, reveals that the sequence of this reputedly early architectural layout starts no earlier than the Miccaotli phase (AD 150-200), grows and functions during the Early Tlamimilolpa to Xolalpan phase (AD 200-600), at whi...
