Colorful material connections: Non-invasive analyses of Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts and their cultural-historical implications

Summary

Non-invasive scientific analyses recently performed by the ‘MOLAB’ mobile laboratory on a number of pre-Hispanic and early colonial pictorial manuscripts provided a host of new data that deepen our knowledge of Mesoamerican coloring materials and painting practices. The huge corpus of available analytical data – obtained from codices Madrid, Cospi, Borgia, Vatican B, Laud, Fejérváry-Mayer, Nuttall, Bodley, Selden, Selden Roll, Tudela, Vatican A, and Mendoza – allows the first cultural-historical interpretive effort aimed at identifying different technological traditions and at evaluating how they match with established stylistic and thematic classifications, as well as their relations with other coloring traditions such as mural painting or textile dyeing. The comparison of manuscripts from different regions and epochs also provides interesting hints on topics such as cross-cultural interactions among pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican painters/scribes, the emic perception of the materiality of color, and the technological changes introduced in early colonial times.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• A Material World: Collaborative Research in Art, Archaeology, and Materials Science in the Study of the Ancient Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14760