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About the Bibliografía Mesoamericana

In recent decades there has been a great increase in the scholarly production pertaining to Mesoamerica. For the period 1514-1960, Ignacio Bernal’s volume, "Bibliografía de Arqueología e Etnografía: Mesoamérica y Norte de México, 1514-1960" lists nearly 15,000 entries. Projections estimate that at least another 20,000 items have been published between 1960 and 1999. As there has not been a corresponding increase in the quality of bibliographic control over this literature, scholars and students have been left with the time-consuming task of searching a series of selective databases and printed bibliographies to maintain a current awareness of pertinent publishing.

The Bibliografía Mesoamericana, jointly supervised by John Weeks of the Museum Library of the University of Pennsylvania and Sandra Noble of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), provides a comprehensive and continually updated bibliographic dataset of the published literature pertaining to the anthropology of Mesoamerica. Content includes archaeology, ethnography, ethnohistory, art history, linguistics, physical anthropology, and other related disciplines.

To provide a relatively complete and retrospective coverage, the Bibliografía Mesoamericana expands on Bernal’s coverage of 1514-1960 using the published author and subject catalogues of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, as well as the library catalogue at the University of Pennsylvania. The Bibliografía Mesoamericana also provides more recent bibliographic coverage using various electronic databases. The coverage includes books, edited volumes, festschrifts, journal articles, essays in collected works, dissertations and theses, obituaries (2 pages +), CD-ROMs, audio and video tapes, and films pertaining to Mesoamerica. It will not include book reviews, sheet maps, working papers and other gray literature, juvenile literature, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, and other unpublished materials.

The geographical coverage includes conventional regional coverage of Mesoamerica as defined by Paul Kirchoff (México, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), including Valley of México; Puebla; Oaxaca; Northern and Central Veracruz; Southern Veracruz and Tabasco; West México; North Central México; Morelos; Huasteca; Central Chiapas; Soconusco; Guatemalan Pacific Coast; Guatemalan Highlands; Southern Maya Lowlands; Northern Maya Lowlands; El Salvador; Honduras west of the Río Ulúa.

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