523 years ago, one of the major cultural crimes in the history of humanity happened: slaughter, imposition of ideologies and dogmas, apart from a systematic cultural annihilation; all this meant the alteration of the independent development and of the future of the autochthonous Latin American cultures. Current Latin American civilization emerged from this event: From the ashes…
Abstract: About 523 years ago, the territory now known as the Americas was ‘discovered’. This event detonated the conquest and colonization of this ‘new world’, processes that altered the historical development of the indigenous civilizations. This work examines one of the most disheartening consequences of this clash of civilizations: the almost total destruction of the indigenous people’s cultural heritage. This annihilation was driven by the implementation of colonial domination, which implied the establishment of a new socio-political order and systematic and forced religious conversion, which included the destruction of the pictographic codices that were seen as ‘works of the devil’.
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Recommended reference: Machin-Mastromatteo, J. D. (2015). From the ashes. Information Development, 31(4), 383-386. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266666915591759