The Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project
at
Davíd Carrasco, Director
Founded in 1982 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project came to Princeton University in 1993 when historian of religions, Davíd Carrasco, joined the Department of Religion faculty. Established with a generous grant from the Raphael and Fletcher Lee Moses Trust, the Archive has organized an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars and students interpreting sacred space and ritual performance in Mesoamerican religions. It also provides support for various research projects in Mexico and houses a collection of over 10,000 transparencies and photographs of excavations and sites, architecture, artifacts, and pictorial manuscripts, as well as a library with over 3,000 books, articles, and conference papers pertaining to the study of prehispanic, colonial, and contemporary Mesoamerican cultures.
Guided by its director, Davíd Carrasco, and an advisory board whose distinguished members include Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, H. B. Nicholson, Doris Heyden, Anthony Aveni, and Johanna Broda, the Archive continues to host a series of conferences and lectures leading to new scholarly publications and is currently involved in research on colonialism and the study of religion and in archaeological excavations at the Great Aztec Temple of Tenochtitlan and at Teotihuacan, the ancient "City of the Gods."
The Great Pyramid of the Sun rises above the sacred precinct of Teotihuacan.
Opportunities for Princeton Students
The Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project offers Princeton University students a wide range of opportunities to enhance their research on Mesoamerican cultures and the study of religion:
Access to the Archive’s database and collections of photographic, audio-visual, and written source materials assists students in the preparation of their junior papers, senior theses, and graduate dissertations on various Mesoamerican topics.
Finally, the Archive’s knowledgeable director and staff can help students appreciate the extraordinary Mesoamerican materials and resources held in the Princeton University Art Museum and the Western Americana Collection at Firestone Library.
Princeton University students and staff members examine an ancient temazcalli (sacred sweatbath) at Teotihuacan.
Mesoamerican Archive Conferences
The Works of Mircea Eliade (1982)
Mesoamerican Archive Publications
The Director
Davíd Carrasco (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor of the history of religions and the author of numerous articles and monographs, including Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire (1982) and Religions of Mesoamerica (1991). For over twenty years, he has taught courses on New World religions, millenarian movements, city and symbol in comparative perspective, ritual performance, colonialism and ceremony, and theory and method in the study of religion. He has received several teaching awards and his "Introduction to American Indian Religions," first taught at Princeton in 1991, attracted nearly three hundred students and was highlighted in the New York Times and Fortune Magazine. In his role as Master of Mathey College, Carrasco works closely with Princeton University freshmen and sophomores and has initiated several student discussion groups and an international visiting scholars program. He has also lectured widely in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and Europe for both scholarly and lay audiences on Mesoamerican religions, cultural discourse in the Americas, and Latin American and Chicana/o literature, music, and the visual arts.
Professor Carrasco’s research interests include comparative studies of sacred landscapes, ceremonial centers, ritual performance, myth, religious imagination, and creative responses to colonialism. He has directed a series of research projects and symposia and has assisted in the organization of several major museum exhibitions, including the Denver Museum of Natural History’s "Aztec: The World of Moctezuma" (Sept. 1992-Feb. 1993) visited by more than 800,000 people. In addition, he is currently editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, a multi-volume reference work to be published in 1999.
For more information about the Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project, please write to:
Professor Davíd Carrasco
Department of Religion, Seventy-Nine Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 08544-1006
Links to Friends and Colleagues
The Feathered Serpent Pyramid Home Page
