# Books before conquest: The Codices Atlas

Research edition · 15 October 2026

European colonization encountered established American book cultures. It did not bring literacy or bookmaking to a bookless hemisphere. This atlas examines that proposition through direct precontact objects, colonial continuations, material examination and comparisons with European books at matched periods and functions.

## Method and coverage

All 14 distinct required works were retrieved through the connected Google Drive and read completely, including notes and references. The Politics of Print and The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America are main title and subtitle of one Hortensia Calvo article; both supplied files preserve that work. The two visual-narration filenames likewise preserve one Federico Navarrete article. The supplied Sahagún title resolves to Ellen T. Baird’s specific study “The Enigmatic A.” The Zouche article required full-page OCR because the searchable text layer contained only its archive wrapper. Page-indexed text, originals, extraction methods, hashes and full reading records remain in the private local research intake.

Full ingestion of the required corpus does not imply full ingestion of every supplementary book or website. Each source record gives its actual reading scope. In particular, publisher descriptions, collection metadata, selected scholarly sections and full articles remain distinct access classes. Blocked collection pages are explicitly marked.

Object manufacture dates, events narrated, modern study dates and reproduction dates are separate. Mixtec, Maya, Nahua and Cuicatec traditions retain distinct names. Borgia Group is an analytical grouping with disputed geographic and linguistic assignments. Porfirio Díaz’s precise manufacture date remains unresolved; Fernández Leal’s original is at Bancroft, not in an INAH facsimile collection.

The evidence demonstrates autonomous precontact bookmaking and complex knowledge systems. Parity is argued through matched purposes: calculation, political history, ritual reading, legal knowledge and manufacture. The screenfold offers a particular advantage in an extended visual field over one ordinary bound opening. European rolls and folding books can share that affordance. No population-wide literacy rate, universal accuracy ranking or continental superiority score is inferred.

Historical images come from separately checked primary digitizations or clearly named historical facsimiles. All 20 local images preserve downloaded bytes and recorded hashes. Four Bodleian images are licensed for noncommercial use; their attribution and noncommercial-use labels remain attached to this public research edition. Borgia and Nuttall plates are later facsimiles. Restricted INAH images of Códice Maya de México are linked rather than copied. None of the supplied scholarly PDFs or extracted full texts is served by the Site.

## Research essays

### The books already on the table

Before asking what Europeans brought to American book culture, put an American book on the table. The Códice Maya de México dates to about 1100, roughly four centuries before the conquest of central Mexico. Its prepared bark-paper surface carries a working arrangement of dates, numbers and deities concerned with Venus. The object establishes something that an argument about definitions can obscure. People in the Americas made books and organized knowledge in them long before colonial contact. That chronology does not depend on stretching the word “book” until it becomes a compliment. It depends on a surviving manufactured object. [Getty and INAH exhibition, CMP-S01](https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/maya_codex/)

The date of the oldest surviving example establishes a point in a longer practice, rather than its birthday. A book requires a surface someone knows how to prepare, pigments someone knows how to produce, conventions a maker can repeat, and readers who can do something with the marks. Those dependencies matter because they turn the question away from an isolated marvel toward a reproducible cultural practice. An organized page presupposes accumulated labor, and that labor deserves the attention usually given to the ingenious person who makes a single object. The number of lost books, however, cannot be calculated from this surviving one.

An earlier ceramic object makes a second distinction visible. A Maya vessel at the Metropolitan Museum carries an ownership text that the curator analyzes through a possessed noun and an individual's name; the record also identifies a syllabic sign. It is dated to the seventh–eighth century. This is evidence of linguistic writing on a different material, rather than another surviving paper book. Keeping those categories apart makes the argument stronger. The history of writing reaches beyond the small set of books that remained intact, and the material history of a book cannot be supplied simply by pointing to an inscription. [James Doyle, object 1992.4, CMP-S16](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/316711)

Three questions therefore need their own evidence. Did a society possess writing that represented linguistic structures? Did it make portable, organized books? How did people use those books to remember, calculate, narrate or act? An alphabet may answer part of the first question, but cannot answer all three. Neither can the existence of a printing press. When the question changes halfway through a comparison, a demonstrated achievement can disappear behind a criterion that was never necessary to the original task. A book's capacity to organize an astronomical table remains an achievement whether its maker used an alphabet or another graphic system.

The comparison with Europe should begin at a common date and a common job. Put a fourteenth-century calendar beside another instrument for consulting time. Put a dynastic history beside a dynastic history. Then inspect the information, reading conventions, physical form and intended audience of each. This approach gives the American object a serious encounter with a peer. It also permits a precise statement about comparative strengths. A long field that keeps relationships visible may serve one task particularly well, while a compact bound volume serves another task under different conditions.

“The Americas” names a geographical frame containing many manuscript cultures. The Maya vessel, a Mixtec dynastic book and a Nahua painted history belong to different languages, political settings and graphic traditions. Moving a discovery from one to all the others would repeat the same flattening that once made European practice the measure of every book. A comparison becomes more informative as its regional affiliations become more exact, because the reader can then distinguish a shared technique from a particular solution and follow the evidence for each.

The starting proposition is firm enough to carry a demanding inquiry. American bookmaking and literacies preceded contact, and their surviving works deserve comparison as accomplished technologies of knowledge. The next question is where parity can be demonstrated and where a specific design provides an advantage. Each answer must remain attached to the object, task and reader for which the evidence exists, including the distinction between an ancient book and a later record of an earlier world.

Sources: CMP-S01, CMP-S16.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### What counts as reading

A reader who follows a line of footprints, recognizes a personal name and finds a dated event is doing several kinds of work at once. Calling the whole page a picture can conceal that work; calling every mark a word can conceal its differences. A vocabulary that describes the operations makes them available for comparison before assigning a rank. Recognition, conventional interpretation, linguistic decipherment, calculation and the ability to produce a new document are related capacities, but they are not interchangeable. A useful account of literacy specifies which capacity it means and whose practice it describes.

For Maya writing, the linguistic distinction is concrete. Erik Boot's epigraphic reference distinguishes logographic from syllabic signs and records grammatical classes, inflections and alternative readings. The source is an older working vocabulary, so its individual decipherments require current checking, but its basic structure shows why a pictorial-looking sign cannot be assumed to communicate only a free-floating idea. A reader can encounter language in a form that does not resemble a European alphabet. [Boot, introduction pp. 3–10, CMP-S07](https://www.mesoweb.com/resources/vocabulary/Vocabulary.pdf)

Nahua manuscripts require another account. Alfonso Lacadena argues that regional scribal practice explains differences in the frequency of phonetic signs, and that Tetzcocan material should not be discounted as merely the result of Spanish influence. He also identifies the surviving writing's concentration on names and calendrical or arithmetic expression. Those positions belong together. Taking his phonetic analysis seriously does not require claiming that every painted history transcribes a continuous spoken account. [Lacadena, pp. 1 and 12–15, CMP-S06](https://www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/journal/804/PARI0804.pdf)

David Charles Wright-Carr approaches central Mexican visual communication through semasiography, a term for conventional graphic communication that need not fix a particular spoken wording, while recognizing language-specific substitutions. His analysis of Otomi colonial contexts also locates the difficulty partly in the categories scholars bring to the material. The difference between these approaches is worth exposing. Readers should be able to see that “writing” can name a disputed boundary as well as a documented set of graphic operations. [Wright-Carr, printed pp. 60–63, CMP-S09](https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/download/5936/4800/7613)

A broad definition need not make all distinctions disappear. The publisher's account of *Writing Without Words* explicitly challenges a ladder that treats the alphabet as the culmination of graphic history. Its declared question invites scrutiny of how knowledge was recorded, while the detailed cases require their own evidence. Two complementary views remain useful. One asks how closely signs represent language. The other asks what organized knowledge people could preserve and use with them. A page can reward both kinds of examination, especially when a linguistic name appears within a larger arrangement of actions, dates and places. [Boone and Mignolo, publisher description, CMP-S08](https://www.dukeupress.edu/writing-without-words)

Speech belongs in the comparison because reading can be a social event as well as an individual encounter. European devotional reading included repeated recitation, and a reader's knowledge of an image or prayer affected how a page worked. Where a particular American performance has not been documented, however, a reconstructed speech remains a hypothesis. Evidence for a sequence and ritual purpose does not by itself preserve the words someone spoke in front of the page. Recognizing that difference leaves room for oral knowledge without pretending that every lost performance can now be recovered. [Stein, recitation and images, CMP-S10](https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-book-of-hours-in-medieval-christianity)

The same restraint applies to access. A society's possession of highly developed books does not tell us what proportion of its inhabitants could compose one, understand one without help, or participate in a reading conducted by a specialist. Those are historical questions about training, authority and participation. Europe requires the same questions. Once literacy is described as a set of situated practices, the reader can compare achievements without making an unearned claim about universal education, and can recognize a skilled American reader without first asking that reader to become European.

Sources: CMP-S06, CMP-S07, CMP-S08, CMP-S09, CMP-S10.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### Unfolding time

Open the Dresden Codex at its Venus tables and time becomes a set of relations that can be consulted. SLUB identifies the relevant sections as page 24 and pages 46–50, where a 584-day Venus scheme extends across 104 years. Calculation appears alongside deities and consequences. These pages organize an astronomical cycle for use within a particular religious world, and their technical work remains visible when that world is taken seriously. Removing the divination would change the task the book was made to perform. [SLUB's content guide, CMP-S04](https://www.slub-dresden.de/en/explore/manuscripts/the-dresden-maya-codex/content)

A European object from an overlapping period makes a useful companion. The Royal Society's MS/45, dated approximately 1385–1400, folds together Christian feast dates, seasonal labor and astronomical calculation. Its lunar cipher uses conventional marks to encode numbers, and parts of the instrument demand considerable expertise. The exhibition explains its probable regional origin through evidence that includes saints and agricultural timing. Nothing in this object supports a division between American symbolic belief and European practical knowledge. The European reader also encountered an arrangement whose uses depended on religion, numerical conventions and learned interpretation. [Royal Society, MS/45, CMP-S13](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/39-a-very-curious-almanack-39-the-royal-society/6QVxDXpcN2LcMQ?hl=en)

The matched task is consultation. A reader needs to locate an entry and connect it to an ordered cycle whose significance depends on conventions learned before opening the book, then decide what follows from the relation between the recorded date and the activity under consideration. That is a more discriminating comparison than counting alphabetic characters on one page and painted figures on another. It directs attention to the recurring units, the visual hierarchy and the physical actions required to bring a relevant section into view. It also asks whether the person looking at the page already possesses the knowledge needed to operate it.

The screenfold offers a specific opportunity here. Several panels can remain visible together, letting the eye follow a longer relation without repeatedly closing one opening and finding another. Against a normal opening in a sewn book, that extended field is a meaningful advantage for some forms of cross-reference. It is a material inference from the formats rather than the result of a measured reading trial. European folds and rolls also create extended fields, so the advantage belongs to the configuration and task, rather than exclusively to one continent. [Dresden's format, CMP-S03](https://www.slub-dresden.de/en/explore/manuscripts/the-dresden-maya-codex); [European book construction, CMP-S11](https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/making/)

Viewed one panel at a time, a sequence depends on the reader carrying information from the preceding panel. Viewed as a longer expanse, neighboring elements can remain available to the eye. The difference concerns memory, attention and handling, and it helps explain why the physical form of a book belongs in an account of knowledge organization. A photograph cropped to one panel can make a continuous manuscript look like a succession of separate pictures. Recovering the neighboring field changes the relations available for inspection, even before a modern reader understands the individual signs.

The astronomical comparison also needs a defined limit. A 104-year scheme demonstrates sustained organization and an intended predictive reach, but it does not, without further calculation and historical analysis, establish that every Maya prediction exceeded every European one. A fair accuracy comparison would identify the particular tables, their assumed epochs, the phenomenon predicted, the period of use and the error measure. The accomplishment already established deserves attention while that more demanding comparison remains open to evidence.

The claim to parity becomes concrete at this level. An American instrument can be assessed through its capacity to organize consequential time, with the same attention to operation given to a European instrument. Where a layout keeps a long cycle together, that is a specific strength. Where both traditions combine prediction with sacred meaning, that shared condition belongs in the explanation. The evidence concerns arrangements on particular pages and the work a trained reader could perform with them, rather than a ranking borrowed from the familiar appearance of one script.

Sources: CMP-S03, CMP-S04, CMP-S11, CMP-S13.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### Whose ancestors make a history

A dynastic book has a practical problem. It must connect the person who claims authority now with people, places and events that make the claim persuasive. A line of descent is therefore also a choice about what to show, what to join and where to begin. John Pohl's account of Mixtec histories follows overlapping people through manuscripts with different political emphases. The comparison among them matters because it gives the reader a way to examine selection within the tradition, rather than treating a painted narrative as an undifferentiated survival from the past. [Pohl, Mixtec Group Codices, CMP-S05](https://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/pohlmixtec1.html)

For a European peer, consider Lewis E 201, a genealogical roll associated with Edward IV and dated approximately 1461–1464. The Penn digital edition explains how parallel lineages, diagrammatic relationships and legendary ancestry contribute to a political argument. Its sacred and legendary origins do not prevent historians from studying its very specific Yorkist purposes. They identify the kind of history its makers were producing and the kind of legitimacy they wanted a reader to accept. [Penn Libraries, Director's Overview, CMP-S17](https://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/chronicle-world)

This pairing changes the question asked of an American pictorial history. Instead of asking whether it has escaped myth and become history, ask how its makers connect origin, kinship, territory and rule, and which parts of those connections other evidence can confirm. Ask the same questions of the European genealogy. A declared ancestor, a marriage and an episode of conquest are not equally secure simply because they share a manuscript. Nor does one fantastical beginning make every subsequent name and relationship worthless.

The visual field is part of the argument. A relationship that occupies a page can be followed, revisited and compared with a neighboring relationship; a sign of place can keep a political claim attached to a landscape. Converting such a page into a paragraph may clarify a proposed interpretation, but it also changes the order in which the reader meets the evidence. Prose unfolds a relation through sentences, while a diagram can keep several relations visible together. A translation is therefore an aid to reading the page whose choices deserve examination alongside the choices of its original makers.

Different books can also expose the difference between a community's past and a particular dynasty's version of that past. Related narratives are valuable because they offer points at which an interpretation can be tested. An omission may be meaningful, but its meaning requires an argument; a gap in survival cannot automatically be assigned a political intention. An absent episode, a damaged region and a scholar's proposed suppression describe different conditions. Following those conditions prevents the appeal of a hidden story from becoming a substitute for evidence about why a particular account survives.

Women belong inside this inquiry about authority. Pohl's account follows Lady Six Monkey as a political actor in the Mixtec histories, while Penn's commentary explains female lines of descent supporting Edward IV's claim. The comparison directs attention to particular relationships rather than assuming that a genealogy simply records fathers and sons. Who acts as a ruler, and whose marriage makes a claim possible? A modern explanation can reproduce a manuscript's hierarchy if it gives an active woman a smaller account than the men around her. [Pohl, CMP-S05](https://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/pohlmixtec1.html); [Penn commentary, CMP-S17](https://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/chronicle-world)

The cultural memory of the manuscript also continues in the people who study it now. British Museum reporting on the work of Omar Aguilar Sánchez and Izaira López Sánchez connects Mixtec codices with Tu'un Savi language and community education. They work within a scholarly present that includes the communities whose histories the books carry. A European collection is one setting in a manuscript's life, and present-day Indigenous scholarship introduces questions of language, education and interpretation that a collecting history alone cannot supply. [SDCELAR report, CMP-S14](https://www.sdcelarbritishmuseum.org/news/watch-the-talk-mixtec-codices-and-the-living-heritage-of-the-nuu-savi/)

Sources: CMP-S05, CMP-S14, CMP-S17.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### Manufacturing a readable surface

A line on a manuscript begins with work performed before the line exists. Someone prepares the support, controls the surface and makes a color that will behave under a brush or pen. Looking at these operations changes the comparison between books. Bark paper is no more an unworked piece of nature than parchment is an untreated skin. The technical question concerns how makers transformed available materials into a usable information surface, how that surface affected the marks and folds a book would require, and how its construction would accommodate repeated handling by a reader.

Getty's account of European manuscript manufacture follows parchment preparation through writing, illumination and the assembly of gatherings into a binding. Scraping, tension, ruling, ink flow and sewing all shape the final object. That account offers a useful sequence of questions for any book, provided its answers are not imposed on a different tradition. A screenfold need not acquire a European spine to become a finished book, and a painting surface need not support a quill to demonstrate skilled preparation. [Getty, Making of a Medieval Book, CMP-S11](https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/making/)

Material examination can also correct what an attractive digital photograph encourages a viewer to assume. The Getty gallery account of Códice Maya de México describes several converging investigations of its age and manufacture. It discusses the paper and colorants alongside damage and biological traces. An authentication claim emerges from the relationships among these findings, including their agreement with the object's physical condition. A manuscript's survival is part of the evidence, but neither a damaged edge nor an ancient support independently proves every proposition about the painting. [Getty gallery text, CMP-S02](https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/maya_codex/downloads/maya_codex_gallery_text.pdf)

The 1531 Huexotzinco Codex gives a closer view of adaptation after contact. Villafana, Haude and Satorius identify multiple Indigenous supports and a varied pigment technology, while discussing the manuscript's early colonial context. Their results include a mixed-clay Maya blue and a yellow supported on a siliceous material, but they do not definitively identify the yellow dye. A careful account can convey the makers' technical sophistication and the researchers' uncertainty in the same passage. [Heritage Science, Results and Conclusion, CMP-S18](https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-021-00524-1)

That study also shows why the origins of a material and the history of its use require separate attention. A material may have a long local history while its use changes with a new patron, purpose or audience. An unfamiliar pigment in a colonial manuscript can invite a hypothesis about contact without proving the mechanism that introduced it. Observation, identification and historical explanation are separate stages of that argument. A visible orange area is an observation; identifying its composition requires analysis; explaining why a painter selected it requires another kind of evidence.

Color therefore belongs to the history of information as well as the history of art. A visible distinction may come from the original colorant, a historical alteration, conservation, photographic capture or a modern screen. Even an accurate photograph presents a material object through another technology. Looking at a blue area cannot reveal its ingredients without analysis, and naming a pigment cannot recover every association it held for a painter or reader. Close reading moves among these kinds of evidence while keeping the actual surface available as the object to which an interpretation must return.

The comparative strength established here is a developed capacity to manufacture precise, organized visual objects from locally understood materials. That achievement has parity with the labor and coordination taken for granted in European manuscript culture. A stronger claim about durability, cost or production efficiency would need matched measurements and a representative set of objects. The existing evidence already connects a support, a pigment and a line with particular choices in manufacture. Following those connections reveals how material knowledge participated in a book's use, and why the surviving object demands more than an appreciation of its pictures.

Sources: CMP-S02, CMP-S11, CMP-S18.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### When a press enters an existing book world

The first press in a place makes a tempting opening date. It offers a machine, an identifiable enterprise and a familiar definition of a book. In Mexico, the John Carter Brown Library gives 1539 as the beginning of printing. Used carefully, that date belongs in a history of reproduction technology. Used as the beginning of American books or literacy, it excludes the earlier manuscripts and inscriptions that survive as direct evidence. The arrival of a press changed an existing world of record making. [John Carter Brown Library, CMP-S15](https://jcblibrary.org/news/how-deep-are-jcbs-connections-mexico/)

The distinction changes what needs explaining. JCB's account of its 66 Mexican imprints from 1544–1600 identifies a multilingual collection with religious and secular uses. Its languages include Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, Purépecha, Zapotec, Tének and Tzotzil. Religious instruction predominates, but higher education, medicine, law and administrative concerns also appear. These books therefore require a history of particular audiences and purposes, not an assumption that a machine brought one uniform culture to a silent continent. The collection is a surviving institutional sample, rather than a census of everything printed or everyone who read it. [JCB, Early Mexican Imprints, CMP-S15a](https://jcblibrary.org/news/early-mexican-imprints-jcb/)

The people behind an imprint also need names. Primeros Libros identifies Jerónima Gutiérrez's publication of *Psalterium chorale* in 1563, while its account of María de Sansoric follows her direction of a shop and its move to Tlatelolco in 1597. A history told only through the best-known male printer can obscure that work. Their cases make ownership, succession and the location of production part of the reading of a title page. [Primeros Libros, Gutiérrez, CMP-S15b](https://primeroslibros.org/printer-biographies/gutierrez-jeronima); [Sansoric, CMP-S15c](https://primeroslibros.org/printer-biographies/sansoric-maria-de)

Manuscripts continued to do consequential work after the conquest. The Huexotzinco paintings were produced in 1531 within litigation involving colonial power and extraction. Their inclusion in that setting demonstrates a use of Indigenous graphic expertise for a new institutional audience; it does not turn the court record into a neutral window onto precontact law. The painter, witness, translator and official occupy different positions in the making of evidence. A painted account acquires its force within those relationships, where the ability to record an obligation and the power to judge a claim belong to different participants. [Villafana, Haude and Satorius, Introduction, CMP-S18](https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-021-00524-1)

European precedent also complicates a simple replacement story. The Met's account of books of hours follows a popular manuscript form into printing, while preserving attention to the continued appeal of handmade examples. The coexistence matters as a comparative principle. A new method of reproducing marks does not automatically eliminate older forms, and different objects may continue to serve different audiences or kinds of value. The Mexican evidence needs its own chronology, but it should not be forced into a story that even the European examples fail to support. [Wendy Alpern Stein, concluding discussion, CMP-S10](https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-book-of-hours-in-medieval-christianity)

The term “first book” therefore needs a qualifier wherever it appears. First surviving printed book, first documented imprint and oldest surviving manuscript are different historical claims, with different vulnerabilities to loss. A work known only through a record does not survive in the same way as an original that can be examined. A later reprint supplies evidence of another moment in a text's life. Following the chain from a confident historical sentence back to an object or document reveals what has actually survived, what has been reconstructed and where a claim remains dependent on an earlier description.

The same care applies to the colonial books that preserve earlier knowledge. A sixteenth-century account may contain an Indigenous classification, an older historical sequence or a practice described by someone who knew it, while also bearing the effects of a new commission and audience. The production date and the time represented answer different questions about that account. Their relationship makes continuity available for examination without treating the surviving manuscript as unchanged evidence from before contact, and makes change visible without assuming that every accomplishment arrived with the colonizer.

This history also asks who controls reproduction now. Even digitized objects have different conditions of access. Getty's Códice Maya exhibition reserves rights to its manuscript images, while the Met marks its Maya vessel photographs as public domain. The fact that both can be viewed on a screen does not make their reproduction terms identical. Modern access is another material condition in the life of these records, affecting which images circulate and how a reader encounters them beyond the institution that holds the original. [Getty, CMP-S01](https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/maya_codex/); [Met, CMP-S16](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/316711)

The press enters a chronology already populated by books, different reading systems and practiced makers. Its arrival can then be understood through the transformation of their circumstances. What did people carry into print, and which voices and purposes did it enable or constrain? Those questions lead back to particular titles, commissions and material traces. As further copies, annotations or production records come into view, they can change an account of who made a book, how it was used and whose knowledge reached its readers.

Sources: CMP-S01, CMP-S10, CMP-S15, CMP-S15a, CMP-S15b, CMP-S15c, CMP-S16, CMP-S18.
Scope: Original comparative synthesis. Each source record states the pages or sections actually read; introductory descriptions are not represented as full-book ingestion.

### Who gets a place in the history

A painted history must decide which relationships deserve a place. The Tira de Tepechpan places local history beside the larger Mexica sequence, and Lori Boornazian Diel reads its noblewomen as participants in the production of political authority. A founding queen, a regent, a marriage and the transmission of noble status can each change a succession. The visual record makes those relations available through registers, time signs and connecting lines. Recognizing them requires a reader to understand both the conventions and the local stakes. [Diel, pp.83–93](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167660)

Diel’s comparison makes omission consequential. The scarcity of women in an imperial history does not establish their absence from political life. A manuscript’s makers can select the past useful to a local claim or a larger dynastic account, and the conditions of colonial inheritance can complicate the surviving evidence. Diel treats claims about Ilancueitl and Atotoztli cautiously because sources disagree. The stronger conclusion concerns historical reading itself: a person who is missing from a record may have been excluded by its argument, rather than excluded from the world it represents.

Federico Navarrete finds another political relation in the paired coronation scenes of Azcatitlan. In his reading, an outwardly Tenochca history distributes signs of authority in a way that favors Tlatelolco. He treats the unequal detail, named ruler and arrangement of people as parts of an authored visual argument. The proposed Tlatelolca position is an inference, not a surviving signature. That difference lets the manuscript remain a sophisticated history without making every modern reading of its intentions certain. [Navarrete, pp.151–153](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167625)

Political memory also depends on narrative form. In the migration histories Navarrete compares, routes and durations lead toward Tenochtitlan, while the established city brings a changed organization around rulers and conquests. The path does more than tell a viewer where a traveler went. It can subordinate earlier settlements to a destination and make possession of that destination appear historically warranted. His account connects painted sequence with possible oral presentation, while acknowledging that the exact coordination of speech and image needs further study. No original recitation is reconstructed here. [Navarrete, pp.39–46](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167492)

The Xolotl debate shows what parity in source criticism requires. Edward Calnek argues that a questionable depopulation statement cannot invalidate every detailed event and relationship in the history. He compares other accounts for agreement and contradiction, while considering how elite dynastic purposes could leave existing rural inhabitants outside the depicted past. Thomas Charlton’s archaeological reassessment offers a different route through settlement patterns, ecology and chronology. His thirteenth-century correlation concerns narrated events; it is not a dating test of the paper. Each particular assertion needs its own corroboration. [Calnek, pp.424–427](https://www.jstor.org/stable/279147); [Charlton, pp.418–423](https://www.jstor.org/stable/279146)

Eva Hunt’s reading of the Cuicatec Porfirio Díaz and Fernández Leal codices adds water, succession and local testimony to that field of inquiry. Paintings, a legal record, oral knowledge and local language help her reconstruct relationships that a generalized imperial story would miss. Her particular identifications have subsequently been challenged, and Sebastián van Doesburg explicitly revises the authority of earlier studies. The books still perform recognizable historical work. Their interpretation changes as evidence and local knowledge change, and the record of those changes belongs beside the painted surface. [Hunt, pp.674–688](https://www.jstor.org/stable/279498); [vanDoesburg](https://arqueologiamexicana.mx/mexico-antiguo/codice-porfirio-diaz)

Sources: B06, A03, A05, A06, A07, B07, COL-S02.
Scope: Political and performance readings remain attributed. These colonial witnesses preserve earlier histories; none becomes a directly precontact artifact by narrating an early event.

### When a reproduction changes the evidence

A reader can make an argument from a color that the original book never had. Norman Hammond compared Mendoza with the 1938 and 1992 facsimiles under natural light at the Bodleian, using Munsell charts to record differences. He found the newer reproduction’s blue and green reasonably accurate overall, but its darker red and reduced purple could alter interpretation. The distinction matters to anyone looking at a digital page. A reproduction is a further witness with production conditions of its own. [Hammond, pp.467–468](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30042510)

Hammond’s pigment suggestions show the boundary between looking and analysis. The bright original red suggested cochineal or annatto to him, whereas a darker facsimile could suggest hematite; he explicitly lacked pigment analysis. Repeating the attractive material name without that condition would convert a hypothesis into a laboratory result. The atlas’s images can support observations of arrangement, line and visible difference. Identifying the composition of a color requires the appropriate examination and a source that reports it.

Sylvia Rodgers Albro and Thomas C.Albro II examined the 1531Huejotzingo manuscript as a physical assembly. Their 1990 study identified four drawings on ficus-based amatl and four on agave-based maguey paper. The Indigenous sheets and pigments shared an archival binding with European text leaves, whose acidic ink created different damage. The comparison supports a particular material achievement: skilled local papers and bright painting survived beside a European writing technology with its own conservation problems. It cannot establish that every Indigenous support is more durable than every European sheet. [Albro and Albro, pp.99,103–105](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3179577)

The binding also changed the reading. Sewing maintained a relation between painted evidence and the legal record but could conceal or damage its surfaces; conservation altered access again. Modern technical study adds another layer. Villafana, Haude and Satorius report specialized pigments and supports in 2021, while leaving some identifications unresolved. The work of making a readable surface continues through the work of preserving and documenting it. Each intervention must remain visible in the account of what a visitor sees. [Albro and Albro, pp.105,108–110](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3179577); [Villafana and collaborators](https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-021-00524-1)

Reproduction can change more than hue. Hunt reports omissions and altered details in reproductions of the Cuicatec codices, with consequences for interpreting place and succession. Baird’s study of the Florentine Codex similarly warns against a confident attribution built from a letter beside a craftsman: her proposed architectural source for the“A”is probable rather than proved. In both cases, an attractive identification needs an evidentiary chain. The apparently small detail can matter because a later reader has used it to connect a maker, place or event. [Hunt, pp.675–676,682,686](https://www.jstor.org/stable/279498); [Baird, pp.292–303](https://www.jstor.org/stable/482236)

The wording of a title can mediate the record just as strongly. Dorothy Penn’s 1939“The Oldest American Book”discusses colonial printing and excludes Indigenous manuscripts from the comparison. Its racial and missionary hierarchy is part of the article’s historical evidence, not the position adopted here. Calvo’s historiography shows why the definition matters: a narrow European printed-book frame can decide whose knowledge counts before a manuscript reaches the table. Reading Penn against the precontact objects changes the question from which colonial imprint came first to which earlier books the title made invisible. [Penn, pp.303–306](https://www.jstor.org/stable/332265); [Calvo, pp.293–295](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227351)

Sources: A02, B03, CMP-S18, B07, B01, B04, B08.
Scope: This essay compares reported examinations and historiographic readings. It does not identify a pigment from a screen, repeat obsolete errors as facts, or present a facsimile as an untouched historical surface.

## Object dossiers

### Códice Maya de México

Direct precontact evidence ·About 1100 ·Maya

Support: Mineral and organic pigments on gesso-prepared bark paper. Format: Surviving screenfold manuscript; organized Venus sequence. Repository: Mexico · Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia / INAH

A prepared bark-paper page is a manufactured information surface. Getty’s exhibition with INAH dates the Códice Maya de México to about 1100, and identifies its mineral and organic pigments on a gesso-prepared support. That combination is direct evidence of bookmaking: makers transformed materials into a surface, organized a sequence and left readers a repeatable set of graphic relations. The date belongs to this surviving object, rather than the beginning of all Maya books.

The manuscript records and predicts the movement of Venus. In the gallery explanation, dates, numbers and deities make successive phases available to a reader trained in their conventions. Astronomical computation and ritual consequence operate together. Applying the same standard to European astronomical and astrological books prevents a modern division between science and belief from becoming a disguised ranking of the cultures that made them.

The authentication history also matters. Getty describes converging investigations of manufacture, age and material evidence. The age of a support alone would not date every mark placed on it; a persuasive assessment needs the several kinds of evidence considered together. The book’s reported modern discovery and early movements remain less secure than a controlled archaeological context would provide. Those provenance limits do not make the object a colonial manuscript, and they should remain attached to the particular historical questions they affect.

This book is the atlas’s firmest early material anchor. It refutes the claim that European arrival introduced books to a bookless hemisphere. It does not establish a literacy rate, a universal American writing system or a numerical superiority over every European table. Its achievement is already specific and considerable: an autonomous technical book culture had made a sophisticated predictive surface by about 1100. The original images remain at the linked institution because their current INAH credit reserves reproduction rights.

Evidence limits: Approximate object date, uncertain early modern provenance and a specialist computational function. The institutional image is all rights reserved and is not reproduced in this atlas.
Sources: CMP-S01, CMP-S02.

### Dresden Maya Codex

Direct precontact evidence ·Ca.1300–1521 ·Maya

Support: Bark-bast paper, prepared for painting. Format: Screenfold; 39 sheets, now preserved in a different display arrangement. Repository: SLUB Dresden · Mscr.Dresd.R.310

The Dresden Codex preserves an American technology for organizing time. SLUB dates the book to approximately 1300–1521 and locates its manufacture on the Yucatán peninsula. Its bark-bast sheets were made into a screenfold, a physical form that lets a reader open a sequence beyond the limits of one bound opening. The current preservation and display arrangement belongs to the manuscript’s later life, rather than its original reading conditions.

SLUB identifies the Venus tables on page 24 and pages 46–50, where a 584-day scheme extends over 104 years. A table makes repeated consultation possible: signs and positions preserve relations so that the reader can return to a place in the cycle. The information is numerical, visual and ritual at once. The page’s accomplishment cannot be described adequately by assigning its figures to decoration and its numerals to the only serious content.

Comparison with a late medieval European folding almanac or volvelle begins with a common task. Each object lets a trained user consult structured time through a portable material device. The European examples also connected calculation with religious, medical or astrological consequence. A fair comparison asks what a user can locate or calculate and which conventions enable the operation. No calculation of comparative prediction error has been carried out here, so the atlas makes no claim that one entire astronomical tradition was more accurate.

The book’s subsequent history adds a different chronology. SLUB records its purchase in Vienna in 1739. That documented acquisition does not establish every earlier journey from Yucatán to Europe. Later reproductions, wartime damage and digitization affect what a modern visitor can see. The displayed images are historical digital surrogates with page identities; they are evidence of the surviving surface, while the institutional guide provides the reading of its calendrical organization.

Evidence limits: Production range, copied calendrical base dates and modern publication dates are different dates. Present imaging does not restore every detail lost through the book’s material history.
Sources: CMP-S03, CMP-S04.

### Tonindeye / Zouche-Nuttall

Direct precontact evidence ·1200–1521 (British Museum object range) ·Mixtec / Ñuu Dzavui

Support: Painted, prepared deerskin. Format: Two-sided screenfold carrying historical and dynastic narratives. Repository: British Museum, London · Am 1902,0308.1

The paper called The Zouche Codex begins with a practical difficulty: the same year name comes back. A calendar sign by itself does not tell a modern reader which occurrence is intended. Richard Long’s 1926 solution was to read dates together with people. A birth, a marriage, a repeated costume or a death could constrain the interval. His argument therefore begins by treating the paintings as an organized record with internal relationships. Pictures, names and numbers have to be read together.

That method is worth showing even where its results have aged. Long divides the manuscript into narrative parts, follows women and men through marriages and descendants, and asks whether a sequence is a genealogy or a succession of rulers. Red division lines help organize his reading, but he also adds a division of his own where he thinks the subject changes. An atlas annotation must distinguish the mark on the manuscript from the line drawn by its interpreter. Both organize information; only one is part of the historical object.

Long argues that the manuscript has historical character, while acknowledging obscure scenes, uncertain identities and alternative readings. His numbered years are explicitly arbitrary. They are an analytic convenience, not a native era, and he cannot securely connect them to the Christian calendar. He sometimes decides between alternatives by assumptions about plausible lifespans and marriage sequences. Those decisions should be visible as arguments. A clean modern timeline that silently adopts them would erase precisely the interpretive work a reader needs to understand.

This older reading also shows why cultural identity must be handled carefully. Long uses Nahuatl names for calendar signs and records competing attributions to Zapotec or Mixtec makers. Current British Museum metadata identifies the object as Mixtec, painted on deerskin and dated 1200–1521. Pohl’s analysis of related Mixtec histories and present Ñuu Savi scholarship provide distinct later perspectives on the older reading. The 1926 paper can still serve the central question without carrying those later facts. It records a sustained attempt to read pictorial historical intelligence, rather than treating the page as decoration. Comparison with European dynastic books should begin with the functions at work—kinship, legitimacy, sequence and remembered action—and then examine the distinct ways each medium makes those relations available.

Evidence limits: Long’s 1926 chronology is historical scholarship, not a current final correlation. The displayed plates reproduce the 1902 facsimile. Present museum names and dates follow separately checked institutional metadata.
Sources: B02, CMP-S05, CMP-S14, IMG-S05, COL-S06.

### Codex Borgia and the Borgia Group

Precontact · origin debated ·Borgia: late fifteenth century (Vatican catalogue); other group objects have individual dates. ·Central Mexican · origin debated

Support: Borgia: prepared animal-skin strip; group descriptions require object-specific checking. Format: Borgia: screenfold. The core comparison comprises Borgia, Vaticanus B, Cospi, Fejérváry-Mayer and Laud. Repository: Borgia: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana · Borg.mess.1. The comparative group is dispersed.

The name Borgia Group brings five books into one analytical frame: Borgia, Vaticanus B, Cospi, Fejérváry-Mayer and Laud. Anawalt describes them as related ritual manuscripts, probably used by priests and diviners, with calendrical, divine and ceremonial content. Their resemblance makes comparison useful, but the group name does not identify an original library, one people or a common workshop. Her 1981 study treats the five as pre-Hispanic and describes them as animal-skin books. Exact production dates and the material condition of each member need their own collection records. The Vatican’s current catalogue dates Borgia itself to the late fifteenth century and describes its joined skin strip. That object-level description does not settle every other member’s origin or date.

Clothing provides Anawalt with comparable details inside a large stylistic category. She began with 102 representative examples of twelve garment types organized through five construction principles, and used repeated attributes to reduce the influence of an unusual depiction or an individual painter. Cut, torso coverage, jackets and full-body ceremonial suits make different repertoires visible. She also adds the ritual obverse of Vindobonensis to a comparison otherwise weighted toward Mixtec historical and genealogical books, because function affects what is depicted. This is a study of represented dress and selected manuscripts. Its categories do not directly count everyday clothing, language communities or the identities of pictured beings.

The resulting regional argument should remain attached to its author and date. Anawalt proposes Puebla-Tlaxcala for Borgia, Cospi and Vaticanus B, drawing on ceramic, mural, costume and religious comparisons; she favors a central/eastern Gulf Coast context for Fejérváry-Mayer and Laud. The latter two combine features she associates with several connected regions. Her study argues against assigning everything with a Mixteca-Puebla appearance to the Mixtec, and calls for archaeological work that could change the result. A provenance display can show proposed areas and competing interpretations, with their supporting features. A precise workshop point would claim more than this evidence establishes.

The export discussion exposes another kind of uncertainty. A July 1519 inventory lists two Indigenous books, but Anawalt notes that several surviving manuscripts have been proposed as those objects. Peter Martyr's description of books as paper also complicates identification with the animal-skin Borgia Group. Her suggestion that Diego de Ordaz might later have carried Laud and Fejérváry-Mayer to Spain is explicitly speculative, and she allows that the story could be spurious. The specific comparative strength supported here is the fine differentiation of related ritual and material repertoires within a circulating visual tradition. A broader comparison of book cultures should preserve this specialized knowledge and its regional variation while seeking secure dates, use histories and matched functions.

Evidence limits: This record describes five actual manuscripts grouped by scholars, rather than a single culture or one book. Anawalt's 1981 production and origin classifications require current object-specific corroboration. Costume counts describe a selected pictorial sample, not population dress or literacy rates. Historical-genealogical comparators and ritual comparators have different functions and may have different dates. No complete chain of custody or general American–European superiority result is established.
Sources: A04, COL-S05.

### Codex Mendoza

Colonial continuation ·1541 (Bodleian catalogue) ·Nahua / Mexica

Support: Paper, painted and glossed; specific pigment identities require analysis. Format: Bound pictorial manuscript with Spanish commentary; historical, tribute and life-cycle sections. Repository: Bodleian Libraries, Oxford · MS. Arch. Selden. A.1

The opening image of Mendoza asks a reader to attend to several things at once. Years frame a city; seated people carry signs of their identities and rank; the central place sign joins a settlement to an assertion of authority. The surviving book was made under colonial patronage for a Spanish royal audience, and Carrasco describes its three sections as a history of Tenochtitlan, a tribute account and a depiction of social life. His dating of 1541–1545 belongs to the object's production history. The earlier world represented on its pages is a different chronological layer, preserved and explained through a commission made after conquest.

Carrasco's reading follows the year signs around the border and into the four-part city image, where water, a central emblem and named figures establish relationships through position and convention. Speech, mat, hairstyle and an attached name sign distinguish Tenoch's status in his interpretation. Conquest scenes below the city connect an overturned or burning temple with a defeated settlement. These marks give a reader coordinated access to time, place, persons and political action. Their arrangement supplies evidence of a developed visual architecture for historical knowledge, while each particular sign reading should remain attached to its scholarly explanation and to the institutional image being inspected.

The Spanish explanations introduce another reader and another setting for interpretation. Carrasco notes that the prose contains information beyond what the pictures directly communicate, and reports disagreements among interpreters before the manuscript was completed. A caption, a painted sign and a later translation therefore need their own places in a close reading. Colonial patronage shaped the book's address without making its Indigenous organization disappear. The useful question is how artists and interpreters selected, arranged and explained knowledge for this commission, and how those choices preserve practices while redirecting them toward a new recipient.

Even a modern reproduction can alter the evidence. Hammond compared the original and the 1938 and 1992 facsimiles under natural light in 2004, using Munsell charts to record color differences. He found consequential changes in reds and purples: a darker reproduced red could suggest a different pigment, while purple washes used to model volume could become faint or nearly invisible. His proposed cochineal or annatto remained a visual hypothesis; he explicitly stated that the pigments had not then been analyzed. These observations concern those facsimiles and cannot automatically diagnose present digital images. They make reproduction history part of the reading, alongside the artist's material and representational decisions.

Mendoza supports a specific comparative strength in the integration of knowledge across a visual field. A reader can examine chronological sequence, spatial relations and authority together, while the tribute and social-life sections connect that organization with material goods and institutions. Carrasco's critique of racial evolutionary accounts also shows how an inherited test of civilization could prevent scholars from recognizing what was present. This dossier supports comparing documentary functions and interpretive operations with matched records elsewhere. It supplies no measurement of population literacy and establishes no general hierarchy between the Americas and Europe; those larger claims require separate evidence about objects, readers and comparable uses.

Evidence limits: Colonial manufacture is distinct from the precontact history represented. Carrasco’s cosmological interpretation and name readings remain attributed scholarship. Hammond’s2005 pigment proposals are visual hypotheses, not chemical identifications. Current date and shelfmark follow the Bodleian record.
Sources: A01, A02, IMG-S01, A05.

### Codex Azcatitlan

Colonial continuation ·Sixteenth century · colonial ·Nahua / Mexica

Support: Paper; European-style bound volume. Format: Pictorial history organized across successive pages and openings. Repository: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

A path runs through Azcatitlan, but following it requires attention to the book as an object. Navarrete describes how a continuous journey is carried through consecutive leaves and how, in one landscape sequence, looking through a leaf against the light reveals a loop that ordinary page turning appears to break. Double-page scenes can also change the rhythm of the journey. Such observations give the reader a material action to examine alongside the painted route. This is a colonial manuscript preserving and altering inherited conventions; Navarrete treats it as sixteenth-century while reporting an alternative proposal that the surviving object is a later copy.

The systems used to organize history change within the manuscript. Migration scenes coordinate places with successive stays and movement, while the imperial section places rulers and their funeral bundles around reigns, conquests and the main temple. Conventional signs for names, places and dates work with depicted people, buildings and landscapes. Navarrete reads European devices such as shading, foreshortening and landscape as resources the artists could select for particular narrative purposes. The evidence supports close comparison of these arrangements. His explanation of deliberate authorial strategy remains an interpretation, and the visual heterogeneity has received other explanations, including haste, multiple painters and copying.

A paired coronation scene brings political memory into the distribution of figures and insignia. Navarrete compares the two Mexica cities, attending to which ruler has a name sign, who is present at the ceremony and how authority is already possessed or visibly conferred. He argues that these choices favor Tlatelolco within a history that also follows an outwardly Tenochca account. The proposed audience structure includes Spanish officials and priests as well as people from both cities. These are deductions from scenes and comparisons, rather than a surviving statement of the painters' intentions. They give the atlas a means of separating visible details from a scholar's historical reconstruction.

Oral presentation matters to this reading because a narrator and an audience could supply knowledge that a painted scene leaves indeterminate. Navarrete connects writing, painting, seeing and hearing, and argues that explanation could vary with the people present. His title's hidden codes concerns layered political and cultural messages; the article establishes no cipher or secret alphabet. Azcatitlan's comparative strength lies in its flexible coordination of route, duration, scene and audience, supported by specific formal examples. The missing performances and uncertain final colonial episodes also mark limits. The surviving arrangement remains available for study while original wording, audience responses and disputed events remain unresolved.

Evidence limits: Colonial object; inferred earlier conventions are different evidence from a physically precontact manuscript. Tlatelolca authorship, hidden political messages and tailored recitations are attributed to Navarrete. The conquest scene discussed at A 03 pp.155–156 has competing identifications; it cannot be captioned as one undisputed event. Material composition and current collection metadata remain unresolved in this source subset. No literacy rate, universal access or American–European overall ranking is established.
Sources: A03, A05, IMG-S04.

### Codex Xolotl

Colonial continuation ·Assembled about 1540 (technical examiner’s account) ·Nahua / Tetzcoca

Support: Native paper, with painted cartographic and genealogical information. Format: Cartographic historical sheets; map, genealogy and event combine. Repository: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

An apparently empty territory becomes the central problem in the modern debate around Xolotl. The account associated with Xolotl and Nopaltzin describes the establishment of political authority in the Valley of Mexico, while archaeological surveys indicate continuing habitation in areas the narrative appears to leave vacant. Calnek argues that this discrepancy must be tested as a particular claim within a dynastic history. It cannot alone dispose of the manuscript's named persons, marriages, places and events. His question concerns the political and historical work performed by the narrative. The thirteenth-century dates discussed here belong to represented events; these papers do not establish the surviving manuscript's physical production date.

Calnek's comparison with Tepanec histories follows relationships that a reader can check across accounts. The texts agree in important respects about arrivals, territories and the marriage linking Acolhua with Cuetlaxochitzin, yet differ over genealogy and the sequence of rulers. A second comparison with the history of Colhuacan finds shared actors and events alongside different accounts of intervention and kingship. Agreement and discrepancy remain together in the evidence. Calnek takes the overlapping detail to establish a historical core, while preserving the need to investigate distortion and omission. A pictorial genealogy can consequently be studied as a sophisticated historical argument while its individual relationships still require corroboration.

Charlton examines the archaeological model used in the argument and makes its assumptions visible. He objects that the settlement absence and ceramic differences invoked for a conflict between Tula and Cholula belong to different periods. His alternative emphasizes population centralization, the position of productive land and water, and changing relations between local communities and larger powers. It moves the proposed correlation of early Xolotl episodes toward terminal Late Toltec and Early Aztec developments. These are arguments within a 1970 s scholarly exchange, rather than an uncomplicated verdict supplied by archaeology. The narrative, the survey observations and the model connecting observations to events each need their own evidence labels.

Territory and descent also explain why historical memory may be selective. Calnek reads Xolotl as a dynastic account in which earlier rulers establish the rights inherited by Texcoco's monarchs. A statement of abandonment could concern the disappearance of a former political order, or the narrative could omit inhabitants whom its elite authors did not consider historically relevant. He explicitly leaves uncertainty about literal intention. The supported comparative claim is that this pictorial history deserves the detailed critical treatment applied to other dynastic records: identify its authors' stakes, compare independent accounts and test each assertion. That treatment preserves its intellectual and historical significance while keeping the omitted rural populations and contested chronology available for further inquiry.

Evidence limits: A06 and A07 date and interpret events; the physical object's manufacture remains unknown in this source subset. Calnek's account of omissions and Charlton's alternative archaeological model remain attributed interpretations. The sources discussed through these papers, including Parsons 1970, Dibble 1951 and Chimalpahin, were not independently ingested in this assignment. The private PDFs overlap at printed p.423: the neighboring article's text must not be attributed to the wrong author. No population literacy prevalence or blanket comparative superiority is established.
Sources: A06, A07, COL-S04.

### Huexotzinco Codex, 1531

Colonial continuation ·1531 ·Nahua / Huexotzinco

Support: Four drawings on ficus-based amatl, four on agave-based maguey, as identified in the 1990 conservation study. Format: Eight Indigenous painted panels incorporated into a colonial legal manuscript. Repository: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Harkness Collection

The Huexotzinco record joins different ways of making a case. Eight painted sheets record goods and services taken from an Indigenous community. A surrounding Spanish manuscript records litigation against members of the first audiencia during Hernán Cortés’s absence. The drawings are part of a struggle over tribute, authority and obligation. Their presence is concrete evidence that pictorial accounting could carry information with consequences in a colonial legal setting. It does not mean that the parties entered that setting with equal power.

The sheets also preserve technical differences that a photograph can conceal. Sylvia Rodgers Albro and Thomas Albro identified four drawings on ficus-based amatl and four on agave-based maguey paper. They describe both as regular, even and skillfully made. The palette includes several colors, with charcoal black and calcium carbonate white identified by microscopy; the red is probably cochineal, with the chemical confirmation still lacking in their report. Their own attempt to reproduce similar paper achieved only partial success. Craft knowledge becomes visible here through the difficulty of remaking the material.

The contrast with the Spanish text is useful because it remains specific. Certain European-paper leaves suffered extensive damage from acidic writing ink, while the Indigenous pigments remained remarkably bright despite prolonged display. Yet the conservators also praised the European paper’s quality and the conditions that helped it survive. This object supplies no simple contest in which one continent’s materials always win. It shows several well-developed technologies with different vulnerabilities. A responsible comparison asks how fibers, inks, colors, handling and storage interact, rather than turning survival into a universal ranking.

The binding changes the reading again. Sewing the large drawings into a smaller legal volume preserved their relationship with the explanatory text and shielded them from some dust and light. It also forced repeated folds, damaged pigments and strained paper. Tight sewing hid writing near the spine from an early microfilm. Conservation required taking the object apart, correcting collation, mending damage and housing the paintings separately. The record now available to readers is therefore also a history of intervention. The visible record depends on those interventions, whose decisions and costs belong beside the paintings in a history of reading.

Evidence limits: Colonial production, despite technologies and conventions with earlier histories. Paper and pigment identifications are those of the 1990 study. One object’s condition cannot establish a general durability ranking.
Sources: B03, CMP-S18, IMG-S03, HUE-S01.

### The Florentine Codex

Colonial continuation ·1575–1577 (current Getty project) ·Nahua / colonial multilingual

Support: Imported European paper; pigments and alphabetic writing. Format: Twelve books in three volumes; Nahuatl, Spanish and images can complement or conflict. Repository: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence · Med. Palat.218–220

A page can carry more than one account. In the Florentine Codex, the Spanish column, the Nahuatl column and the images do not always say the same amount. Ellen Baird’s study of Book 9 makes that unevenness useful. Some craft chapters have a full Nahuatl account but little Spanish explanation. Drawings occupy the space that Spanish prose leaves open. They show procedures, materials and workers. Pictures perform part of the text’s informational work. Their selection, sequence and placement deserve as much attention as their style.

This knowledge was assembled through collaboration. Baird describes interviews conducted over two decades, consultation of pictorial manuscripts, comparison among communities and assistance from Indigenous scholars trained at Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. The named Nahua collaborators include Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita and Pedro de San Buenaventura, alongside Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano and Mateo Severino. Their work moved across Nahuatl, Spanish and Latin; these surviving names do not identify every painter or consultant. That account belongs to colonial history, with its unequal institutions and missionary purposes. It does not make colonial alphabetization the beginning of Indigenous intellectual life. Rather, it reveals an encounter among learned people and existing media, with earlier knowledge carried into a new and contested manuscript form.

The familiar opposition between Indigenous pictures and European perspective becomes less useful under close inspection. Baird follows repeated buildings, arches, columns and tiled platforms through the craft scenes. The components look European, yet artists detach and rearrange them in ways she connects with Indigenous pictorial composition. A recurring setting can organize a sequence of changing operations. The tiled stage and the craft procedure therefore need to be read at different levels: one establishes the scene; the other transmits the knowledge the scene holds.

One small letter warns against easy conclusions. An A on a column beside a goldworker was taken as an artist’s signature, sometimes associated with Agustín de la Fuente. Baird finds the attribution chain inconclusive and proposes that the column, including its letter, came from a printed architectural model, perhaps Serlio. She does not prove that source. The disputed source remains useful evidence of the artists’ capacity to select, reorganize and repurpose imported forms within an active visual practice.

Evidence limits: A colonial collaborative work, not an untouched precontact survivor. Baird’s probable Serlio attribution remains unproved; the current date 1575–1577 replaces the older article’s dating.
Sources: B01, IMG-S07, FL-S01, FL-S02.

### Añute / Codex Selden

Colonial continuation ·Shortly after 1556 ·Mixtec / Ñuu Dzavui

Support: Prepared hide; painted surface with an earlier concealed text. Format: Screenfold, read upward from the bottom in boustrophedon according to the catalogue. Repository: Bodleian Libraries, Oxford · MS.Arch.Selden.A.2

The Bodleian catalogue dates the surviving Selden manuscript to shortly after 1556, while describing its style as preconquest. That distinction is indispensable. The narrative traces rulers of Añute, now Jaltepec, through events from 783 to 1556; those event dates are not evidence that this physical painting was made in 783. A book can preserve a long earlier history without being a surviving object from its first episode.

The catalogue specifies a bottom-up boustrophedon reading order. Red divisions and the placement of people, places and dates organize a path that differs from an alphabetic page read across parallel horizontal lines. The visitor must learn the book’s own routing conventions. The resulting history is conventional and ordered, even where its written surface does not fix one continuous spoken wording.

The manuscript also has a material history below the visible surface. Bodleian’s conservation research and associated hyperspectral work identified concealed painting. Processed imaging is a scientific visualization produced through an analytical method, rather than an ordinary photograph of an exposed page. The existence of a palimpsest demonstrates that a painted support could be revised and reused; it does not allow the atlas to invent the complete earlier narrative.

Placed beside Tonindeye, Añute shows continuity with a difference. One object supplies a directly precontact survival; the other shows an inherited book format still active after conquest. Their relation supports an account of American literacy that persists, changes and retains local political purposes. It also prevents a chronological filter from mistaking traditional appearance for a date of manufacture.

Evidence limits: Visible painting and represented historical dates are distinct. The concealed narrative is not reconstructed. Full hyperspectral-paper ingestion is not claimed.
Sources: IMG-S02, MAT-S01, SLD-S01.

### Tira de Tepechpan

Colonial continuation ·Colonial manuscript recounting earlier local and Mexica histories ·Nahua / local history

Support: Painted historical manuscript; fiber or pigment identities are not supplied by Diel’s visual analysis. Format: Parallel pictorial registers with time signs and connecting relationships. Repository: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, reported in Diel 2005; current shelfmark not independently checked.

Lori Boornazian Diel studies a history that places Tepechpan beside the larger Mexica political sequence. The Tira coordinates time, rulers, kinship and local events through registers, color, connecting lines and conventional signs. The page does not merely store isolated people. Its relations make arguments about local standing and political continuity, and those arguments depend on knowing how to read the arrangement.

Women perform several kinds of political work in Diel’s reading. A founding queen, a transmitter of noble status, an alliance maker and a regent occupy positions that affect the succession and authority of men around them. Their inclusion gives a reader evidence about the history the record’s makers chose to tell. It does not turn every surviving pictorial history into a comprehensive account of women’s participation.

The contrast with imperial histories is revealing precisely because an absence is ambiguous. Diel argues that a noblewoman’s omission cannot be read directly as proof that she had no political power. The manuscript’s local purpose, the kind of legitimacy its makers defend, and the conventions of the genre affect what appears on the surface. Claims about Ilancueitl and Atotoztli remain difficult because records disagree and some are tied to colonial inheritance disputes.

This is a comparative strength of source criticism as much as a claim about an Indigenous page. A European dynastic roll and a Nahua pictorial history both select relations useful to political authority. Recognizing American historiography at parity means allowing its authors to make sophisticated arguments and also subjecting those arguments to the scrutiny applied to European records. Political selection is evidence about the work of a history; it is not a reason to deny that the work is historical.

Evidence limits: Diel’s 2005 interpretation concerns selected colonial witnesses and their earlier histories. It is not a census of political participation, and disputed regencies remain disputed.
Sources: B06.

### Porfirio Díaz / Tututepetongo

Date uncertain · contact era ·Sixteenth century, probably early; exact date unresolved ·Cuicatec

Support: Skin; painted screenfold, with later alphabetic glosses. Format: Screenfold manuscript with a historical section and a partly unfinished ritual/calendrical section. The ritual portion has no full equivalent in Fernández Leal. Repository: Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, INAH, Mexico City ·35-50

A local history can carry enormous stakes without describing an empire. Eva Hunt places the historical section of Porfirio Díaz in the Cuicatec district of Oaxaca, where communities contested water, tribute and succession. She rejects earlier readings that made its scenes into sweeping migrations across Mesoamerica. Her alternative ties painted places to named hills, streams and settlements, then compares them with legal records and living geographical knowledge. The scale is small because the disputed rights were local. That precision is a strength of the record.

Hunt’s reconstruction turns on a lawsuit brought in 1562 by Catarina Salomé to protect her young son’s succession rights. According to Hunt’s reconstruction, painters had prepared pictorial records used with an earlier tribute assessment, while witnesses could relate foundations, marriages, wars and succession through remembered history. The evidence moved among image, alphabetic document, performance and place. These were cooperating means of making a claim intelligible, not stages on an inevitable journey toward the European book. The colonial court changed their setting and incentives without making their prior knowledge disappear.

Damage itself enters the dispute. Catarina alleged that an adversary had stolen and mutilated the documents. Hunt connects that report with cut-out place signs in Porfirio Díaz and sometimes uses Fernández Leal’s parallel scenes to recover what is missing. The relationship is persuasive within her argument, but it does not prove who made each hole or when. The chronology is also unsettled. Faint or ambiguous numerals produce several possible spans, while the parallel manuscript gives different dates. A route through this object should preserve those alternatives rather than force them into one seamless historical animation.

Porfirio Díaz is also more than the historical section used in this case. Hunt describes a second, partly unfinished ritual and calendrical section and leaves its full analysis for other work. She relates its imagery to broader southern Mexican manuscript traditions without dissolving Cuicatec identity into them. Her mid-sixteenth-century copying date likewise remains a scholarly position requiring comparison with later research. Later work revises that account. Van Doesburg states that the manufacture date remains unknown, probably early in the sixteenth century, and challenges earlier identifications. INAH supplies a broad sixteenth-century date. The manuscript, its narrated campaigns and its proposed exemplars therefore retain separate, qualified chronologies.

Evidence limits: Hunt’s 1978 historical identifications and production reconstruction are attributed and have been revised by later scholarship. No firm precontact manufacture label is assigned. Current dating and custody follow INAH and van Doesburg.
Sources: B07, COL-S01, COL-S02.

### Fernández Leal

Colonial · attribution qualified ·Sixteenth century (Bancroft description) ·Cuicatec

Support: Native amatl paper. Format: Painted scroll; distinct from the skin screenfold of Porfirio Díaz. Repository: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

The format matters before the interpretation begins. Fernández Leal is a continuous strip, a tira; the pages familiar from its printed facsimile belong to the reproduction. Hunt makes that distinction explicit when comparing it with the screenfold Porfirio Díaz. To read the strip as a row of modern pages risks importing boundaries it did not possess. Following the strip’s continuity reveals how a printed edition divided the record into convenient segments for scholarly comparison.

Hunt identifies a Cuicatec history of local places, alliances, conflict and rights. Parallel scenes link it with the historical portion of Porfirio Díaz, but the two records are not identical copies in every detail. Figures, dates and the placement of particular places can differ. Some scenes survive in one witness and are missing or damaged in the other. That relation makes comparison useful precisely because it does not produce perfect agreement. Each object retains its own history of making, revision, handling and loss.

The differences between original and reproduction are particularly instructive. Hunt reports that a printed copy showed fifteen ancestral houses where the original preserved twenty, with the last row faint. Written details, colors and fine marks could disappear in reproduction. Hunt describes the support as skin and reports sewing, resewing and repairs using European-style paper. The current Bancroft description identifies the original as native amatl paper, so Hunt’s material label is retained here as a historical identification that the holding library supersedes. Her access did not allow every repair to be examined closely. These details show why a scan or facsimile must identify its edition and limits. A reproduction provides access; it does not replace the object’s evidence without remainder.

The collection history has gaps as well. Hunt reports nineteenth-century ownership by Benjamín Ladrón de Guevara, a connection with Martínez Gracida, later disappearance and eventual custody at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. That is a reported chain, not a completely documented journey from its makers to its present repository. Nor does her proposed colonial copying date settle every later scholarly question. Narrated precontact history, the manuscript’s argued production date and its much later collection history require separate chronologies. Those different times meet in the strip, but they should not be collapsed into one.

Evidence limits: Hunt’schronological reconstructions are attributed scholarship. Present custody/support follow the holding library. Inconsistent published length is not used; INAH facsimiles are distinct from the Bancroft original.
Sources: B07, COL-S03.

### Tripartito del christianissimo y consolatorio doctor Juan Gerson

Colonial print ·1544 ·Colonial Mexican print

Support: Printed paper. Format: Printed doctrinal volume; displayed title leaf from the JCB copy. Repository: John Carter Brown Library, Providence

The 1544 Tripartito gives the early press a material object to accompany its founding date. Its title leaf advertises religious instruction through a dense block of black type. The volume belongs to the John Carter Brown Library’s early Mexican imprints, a collection whose 1544–1600 range contains several languages and functions. A single religious book is evidence of a particular publication, rather than proof that colonial readers encountered only one genre.

The title page performs several tasks before a reader reaches the body. It identifies an authority, names the work and frames the promised use of its text. These are visual and organizational choices. Comparison with a painted history begins at that level of function without claiming that typographic naming and pictorial naming are the same writing system. Both establish relations between a record, its authority and a reader trained to interpret the marks.

Calvo’s historiographic review explains why the press should enter a wider book history. Manuscripts and oral circulation continued, and colonial intellectual activity cannot be assessed only by counting European literary genres. The book’s religious setting matters materially: commissioning, translating, supplying paper and producing copies all require institutions and labor. The presence of a press establishes a mode of reproduction; it does not establish intellectual freedom or universal access.

The image reproduced here is an institutional scan of a particular copy. Binding, missing leaves, annotations, stamps and firebrands can distinguish copies of one edition, so a title page is not an interchangeable token for every surviving exemplar. The local image remains linked to its catalogue and to the JCB’s explicit CC BY4.0 reuse policy. That chain lets a visitor return from a visual comparison to the material witness from which it began.

Evidence limits: The atlas does not claim full-text ingestion of this historical imprint. The title image and institutional catalogue were checked; broader print claims follow Calvo and JCB.
Sources: B04, CMP-S15, IMG-S09, CMP-S15a.

### Molina’s Vocabulario

Colonial print ·1571 ·Colonial Mexican print

Support: Printed paper. Format: Bilingual lexicographic volume; title and text leaves from a JCB copy. Repository: John Carter Brown Library, Providence

The 1571 Vocabulario places alphabetic print in the history of Nahuatl without making the alphabet the beginning of that history. The reproduced title and text leaves show a lexical reference organized for consultation. Repeated entries, columns and typography turn the page into a finding device. Those features are technical choices about how a reader reaches information, just as the arrangement of people and signs governs the use of a painted history.

The bilingual book also exposes an uneven encounter. A lexicon can help people learn and translate, while its categories and intended institutional uses arise within colonial evangelization. It does not transparently contain every relation in the language it describes. The work of Indigenous speakers and language specialists belongs to the conditions that made such books possible even when a title page concentrates credit in a single named author.

The JCB’s broader early Mexican collection includes Nahuatl alongside Spanish, Latin, Purépecha, Zapotec, Tének and Tzotzil. Printing therefore entered several language communities and served changing audiences. Calvo’s critique of a simple printing revolution is useful here: manuscript, speech, painted record and printed reference could coexist, each answering particular purposes rather than passing through a universal sequence from primitive to advanced.

Reading a title and one text leaf establishes layout and bibliographic identity, while a full account of the dictionary’s linguistic choices would require sustained lexical analysis. This dossier keeps that boundary visible. The object is present to anchor the print history and permit a material comparison, not to claim that every entry has been analyzed. Visitors can return to the institutional copy and compare the reference page with the other finding systems in the atlas.

Evidence limits: Image and catalogue inspection, not full historical dictionary ingestion. No entry-level translation is supplied or invented.
Sources: B04, CMP-S15, IMG-S10, CMP-S15a.

### Who gets to call it the first book?

Historiographic comparison ·1539 onward / historiography of 1939 and 2003 ·Comparative book history

Support: Printed books and the definitions used to count them. Format: A thematic research dossier, rather than one physical object. Repository: Multiple collections; this dossier studies historiography.

The arrival of a printing press is a major event. It is not the arrival of literacy. Keeping those statements separate changes the history of the American book. Hortensia Calvo’s survey shows how a discipline organized around European print could treat imported books as the natural carriers of knowledge and Indigenous records as an adjacent curiosity. A fairer account starts earlier and asks a harder question: which functions did people need their records to perform, through which materials, institutions, languages and learned practices? Print enters an existing world of those functions.

Calvo also shows that histories of printing carry their own politics. Nineteenth-century bibliographers could use limited colonial publishing output and restrictive laws to argue that Spain had stifled intellectual life. Later researchers found a vigorous transatlantic book trade that did not simply follow the prohibitions. That discovery corrected an account of isolation, but some interpretations turned European books into evidence of a civilizing mission. Neither frame makes the circulation of an object identical with its reception. An imported volume does not tell us who read it, how it was used or what other forms of knowledge remained active.

Early colonial presses worked through power as well as invention. Catechisms, grammars and vocabularies served missionary projects; official and religious publications served administrative and elite institutions. Paper, machinery, licenses, costs and patronage constrained what could reach print, and Calvo discusses scholarship arguing that manuscript and oral circulation remained central, especially in the first two centuries of Spanish rule. Languages also mattered materially: setting a text, checking a translation and correcting proofs required people with particular skills. The history belongs to writers, Indigenous collaborators, translators, compositors, press workers and readers as well as named printers.

Dorothy Penn’s 1939 essay offers a sharp example of what can be lost when categories go unexamined. Her Oldest American Book challenges a New England-centered story by turning to Mexico’s Doctrina breve. Yet its broad title still limits the comparison to colonial printing, leaving Indigenous books outside the frame. Missionary achievement is praised as civilization, and explicit racial comparisons appear in the account. The article is valuable evidence of that historical rhetoric. It is not reliable authority for the oldest surviving American book, and even its printed dates contain errors that modern institutional records must correct.

Penn’s technical and labor passages need the same discipline. Proposed edition size, production duration, ink-making and Indigenous apprentices’ exact tasks are conditional reconstructions, not established workshop records. Her mediated contract excerpts nevertheless point toward a fuller history of obligations, penalties, profit shares, supply chains and an enslaved man named Pedro. Those details require archival verification, but they make the questions better. Comparing American and European books at matched functions and periods makes specific capacities and coercions visible. Precontact objects establish Indigenous achievement outside a history restricted to printing. A comparative history then becomes more demanding: it must explain who could make records, who could interpret them and who could decide that they counted.

Evidence limits: B05 is a duplicate of B04 and provides no independent corroboration. Calvo’s 2003 survey is not a current census of all imprints. Penn’s errors and colonial racist framework must be identified; her title cannot establish the oldest American book. Actual archival contract and current imprint metadata require supplementary verification.
Sources: B04, B08.

## Required-source register

### A01 ·City as Symbol in Aztec Thought: The Clues from the Codex Mendoza

David Carrasco. 1981. City as Symbol in Aztec Thought: The Clues from the Codex Mendoza. History of Religions 20 (3): 199–223.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062365

Complete Drive PDF; 26 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Carrasco reads the Mendoza foundation page as a political, calendrical and cosmological organization of the city. His critique of inherited European categories informs the atlas’s comparison of intellectual practices.

Limits: This is a 1981 religious-studies synthesis; its cosmological model and semasiographic vocabulary should be presented as scholarship of that period, alongside current epigraphic accounts. The article does not establish population-wide literacy rates, phonetic coverage, or a universal ranking against European books. Do not use the article's count of sixteen surviving precontact manuscripts (p.203) as a current catalogue total; definitions and attributions change. The Zumarraga book-burning scene is explicitly labeled potentially apocryphal in the article (p.203, n.12); do not retell it as a witnessed event. The claimed painter and translator identities, production date range, and collection journey require current institutional verification before being stated unqualified in the site. Carrasco's paraphrases of primary authors and cited scholars remain mediated by this article; these other works were not independently read in this intake.

### A02 ·Clarifying Color in the "Codex Mendoza"

Norman Hammond. 2005. Clarifying Color in the "Codex Mendoza". Latin American Antiquity 16 (4): 467–468.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30042510

Complete Drive PDF; 3 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Hammond compares the original Mendoza with two twentieth-century facsimiles, showing how red and purple reproduction differences can alter interpretation.

Limits: Do not transform Hammond's possible cochineal or annatto into an established pigment identification. The reported discrepancies concern particular print facsimiles; they do not by themselves diagnose current Bodleian digital images. This two-page comment is about reproduction accuracy, not an argument for total American or European superiority. The historical statement that pigments had not been analyzed is time-specific to 2005 and must not be repeated as a claim about present research.

### A03 ·The Hidden Codes of the Codex Azcatitlan

Navarrete, Federico. 2004. The Hidden Codes of the Codex Azcatitlan. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 45 (Spring): 144-160. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167625.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167625

Complete Drive PDF; 18 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Navarrete analyzes narrative organization, mixed visual conventions and politically differentiated audiences in Azcatitlan; the proposed hidden messages remain attributed interpretations.

Limits: Audience-specific political readings, Tlatelolca authorship and oral performances are reasoned scholarly hypotheses. The title does not describe a demonstrated cipher. Colonial manuscript evidence does not by itself date the practice before contact.

### A04 ·Costume Analysis and the Provenience of the Borgia Group Codices

Anawalt, Patricia. 1981. Costume Analysis and the Provenience of the Borgia Group Codices. American Antiquity 46 (4): 837-852. https://www.jstor.org/stable/280110.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/280110

Complete Drive PDF; 17 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Anawalt compares garment construction and recurrent costume details in the Borgia Group and Mixtec books. Her regional origin proposals remain hypotheses, not settled workshop locations.

Limits: A 1981 comparative intervention. Artistic resemblance, costume and trade do not uniquely establish region, language or community. The Ordaz export route is explicitly speculative and is not drawn as a documented journey.

### A05 ·The Path from Aztlan to Mexico: On Visual Narration in Mesoamerican Codices

Navarrete, Federico. 2000. “The Path from Aztlan to Mexico: On Visual Narration in Mesoamerican Codices.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 37 (Spring): 31–48.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167492

Complete Drive PDF; 19 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Navarrete traces the joint organization of time, space, movement and performance in Mexica migration histories, and the active adaptation of bound-page formats after contact.

Limits: All manuscripts in the main comparison were made after conquest. The article argues continuity of organizing conventions, but supplies no direct precontact manufacture date, literacy rate or proof that no European analogue exists.

### A06 ·The Historical Validity of the Codex Xolotl

Edward E. Calnek. 1973. The Historical Validity of the Codex Xolotl. American Antiquity 38 (4): 423–427.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/279147

Complete Drive PDF; 6 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Calnek argues for point-by-point historical scrutiny of Xolotl, testing a recoverable historical core alongside political selection, discrepancies and dynastic purpose.

Limits: The claim of general authenticity is Calnek's conclusion, not proof of every episode or exact date. His thesis about omissions is an interpretation, and he acknowledges uncertainty over whether abandonment was meant literally. Parsons 1970, Dibble 1951, the Tepanec text and Chimalpahin are discussed through Calnek here; they were not independently read in this intake. This article does not establish the social distribution of literacy or a comparative European ranking. Do not conflate dates of depicted events with production dates of surviving manuscripts.

### A07 ·Texcoco Region Archaeology and the Codex Xolotl

Thomas H. Charlton. 1973. Texcoco Region Archaeology and the Codex Xolotl. American Antiquity 38 (4): 412–423.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/279146

Complete Drive PDF; 13 pages including repository wrapper where present. Footnotes, captions and references read; page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Charlton proposes an archaeological and ecological reassessment of Texcoco settlement patterns and their correlation with events narrated in Xolotl.

Limits: This is an argument within a 1970 s archaeological debate, and its period terminology and assumptions need current scholarship alongside them. Table 1 contains percentages of settlement types within regions, not a direct count of literate people or books. An unoccupied survey area, omitted inhabitants in a narrative, and abandoned political sovereignty are different claims. Charlton's account and Calnek's critique use different explanatory strategies; presenting both clarifies uncertainty rather than proving one literal history. Parsons 1970 is known here through Charlton's quotations and argument; no claim of full-text ingestion of Parsons is made.

### B01 ·Sahagún’s Codex Florentino: The Enigmatic A

Baird, Ellen T. 1987. “Sahagun’s Codex Florentino: The Enigmatic A.” Ethnohistory 34 (3): 288–306.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/482236

Complete article, journal pp. 288–306, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Baird treats Book 9 images as carriers of technical information, shows how Indigenous compositional habits could operate through European motifs, and replaces an unsupported signature attribution with a qualified copying hypothesis.

Limits: 1987 interpretive art history; its precontact/colonial periodization and counts should be contextualized with current manuscript scholarship. Baird’s corpus dates (1578–80) and Robertson-derived style categories are not a substitute for current institutional dating. Sahagún is the subject, not a coauthor, despite automated archive metadata.

### B02 ·The Zouche Codex

Long, Richard C. E. 1926. “The Zouche Codex.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 56: 239–258.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2843612

Complete article, journal pp. 239–258, including notes and references. Scanned text recovered with Apple Vision OCR and read against the original.

Shows an early scholarly attempt to read the manuscript as a structured historical and genealogical record, using the combination of calendrical signs and life events rather than treating it as free illustration.

Limits: 1926 scholarship with obsolete terminology and speculative identifications; OCR has column losses and occasional character errors. Original PDF contains no searchable article text; its cover alone is searchable. Long repeatedly assumes normal lifespans, marriage sequences and textual mistakes to decide competing chronologies. Current institutional and specialist sources are required for present-day dates and names.

### B03 ·The Examination and Conservation Treatment of the Library of Congress Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex

Albro, Sylvia Rodgers, and Thomas C. Albro II. 1990. “The Examination and Conservation Treatment of the Library of Congress Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex.” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 29 (2): 97–115.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3179577

Complete article, journal pp. 97–115, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Provides direct material evidence for two Indigenous paper technologies and a varied palette within one colonial legal object, alongside European linen paper, damaging iron-containing inks and a binding that changed access.

Limits: Conservation identification as reported in 1990; distinguishes observation, microscopic identification, source-based probability and unsupported certainty. Uses dated ethnic and botanical language. The paper calls agave a cactus, a terminology error that should not be copied.

### B04 ·The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America

Calvo, Hortensia. 2003. “The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America.” Book History 6: 277–305.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227351

Complete article, journal pp. 277–305, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

The discipline’s criteria for cultural achievement have been political and changeable. Calvo surveys a move beyond the European printed book toward material, oral, manuscript and Indigenous forms of knowledge.

Limits: A 2003 survey of scholarship then available; the sixteen-surviving-codices figure and imprint chronologies are historical claims to check against current institutional records, not timeless totals. Several arguments are Calvo’s summaries of other scholars and must be attributed accordingly.

### B06 ·Women and Political Power: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Noblewomen in Aztec Pictorial Histories

Diel, Lori Boornazian. 2005. “Women and Political Power: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Noblewomen in Aztec Pictorial Histories.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 47: 82–106.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167660

Complete article, journal pp. 82–106, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Argues that inclusion and exclusion of named noblewomen vary with local and imperial political agendas; visual conventions record legitimate descent, alliances and exceptional female rule.

Limits: Interpretive causal argument rather than a census of all women or all histories; surviving histories are colonial and recount precontact events. Local bias, genre and commissioning context matter. Some regency and political-motive readings are explicitly conjectural.

### B07 ·The Provenience and Contents of the Porfirio Diaz and Fernandez Leal Codices: Some New Data and Analysis

Hunt, Eva. 1978. “The Provenience and Contents of the Porfirio Diaz and Fernandez Leal Codices: Some New Data and Analysis.” American Antiquity 43 (4): 673–690.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/279498

Complete article, journal pp. 673–690, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Grounds the historical sections in Cuicatec geography, a succession dispute and water rights; demonstrates the need to read originals and to combine pictorial, alphabetic and oral evidence.

Limits: Hunt reconstructs manuscript creation and mutilation by inference from a legal record and physical traces. Several personal names, place-names and dates are unresolved; three possible Porfirio Díaz spans (226, 263, 280 years) and different Fernández Leal totals remain. Current institutional dating and later scholarship must be consulted before publishing production dates as settled.

### B08 ·The Oldest American Book

Penn, Dorothy. 1939. “The Oldest American Book.” Hispania 22 (3): 303–306.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/332265

Complete article, journal pp. 303–306, including notes and references. Page-indexed extraction retained privately.

Documents a 1939 claim for Mexico’s priority in American colonial printing and the assumptions through which European missionary print was presented as civilizing achievement.

Limits: Contains racist comparisons between Indigenous peoples, missionary triumphalism, explicit speculations about labor/ink/print runs, and factual/typographical errors. The printed p. 303 gives Bay Psalm’s date as 1639 and later says 1594 for a publication called the following year after 1543; the latter is visibly printed in the scan and is not just OCR. Do not repeat these errors or its broad 'oldest' title as fact.

## Open questions and research limits

Fine-grained phonetic readings, particular original oral performances, debated histories of regency, exact Borgia provenance and several Cuicatec narrative identifications require continuing specialist inquiry. They are not solved by the interface. The current research applies critical treatment to American and European sources symmetrically.

No full translation of an Indigenous manuscript or modern voice performance is invented. The numerical teaching calculator is an original generic explanation of additive values, not a transcription of one panel. The provenance routes connect known episodes and mark gaps; they do not imply a complete transport reconstruction.