Karl Anton Nowotny (June 21, 1904 in
Hollabrunn – December 31, 1978 in
Vienna)[1] was an Austrian
ethnographer,
art historian and academic, specialising in the study of
Mesoamerican cultures. He is most renowned for his analyses and reproductions of
Mesoamerican codices, and his commentaries on their iconography and symbolisms.
Nowotny was a pioneer and leading exponent of applying comparative ethnography to the study of
pre-Columbian and
conquest-era texts and
codices.[2] In this technique, the meaning and symbolism of the texts are analysed and compared with the cultural practices and beliefs of modern
indigenous Mesoamerican peoples whose traditions have been maintained. Nowotny used comprehensive ethnographic studies—such as those conducted by
Leonhard Schultze in the 1930s among the
Nahuas of the
central Mexican altiplano—as a means of garnering further insight into the ancestral practices and beliefs underpinning the codices and related iconographies.[3]
Nowotny also contributed extensively to the study and interpretation of pre-Columbian
Mesoamerican calendars, their functioning and how they were used. Building upon work by earlier scholars such as
Eduard Seler, Nowotny and his contemporaries like
Alfonso Caso and
Paul Kirchhoff greatly added to the scholarly understanding of calendrical elements such as the central Mexican tonalpohualli, veintena and trecena cycles.[4] Nowotny's analysis and exposition[5] of the ritual and divinatory importance of the tonalamatl almanac has been regarded as of "critical importance" to the modern understanding of this almanac, and a significant development beyond the primarily astronomically based approach of Seler and other predecessors.[6]
^Such as in Nowotny's Tlacuilolli, first published in 1961. See also the first English-language translation of this work, published in 2005 by University of Oklahoma Press (Nowotny 2005).
Nowotny, Karl Anton (2005). Tlacuilolli: style and contents of the Mexican pictorial manuscripts with a catalog of the Borgia Group. George A. Everett, Jr. and Edward B. Sisson (trans. and eds.), with a foreword by Ferdinand Anders (First English ed.). Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
ISBN0-8061-3653-7.
OCLC56527102.