Forgery of the Past: The Scientific Analysis of the Codex Cardona and the Assumed Lost Relaciones Geográficas of Coyoacán and other Villas of Mexico City during the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Multiple fragments of the so-called Codex Cardona began to circulate among street markets, boutique bookstores, and art galleries of Mexico City, the USA, and Europe between 1970 and 1980. It is estimated that this large format manuscript has 800 pages and 300 colorful plates describing key historical passages and geographic descriptions of the key towns and villages of Mexico after the conquest and during the first century of Spanish domination. Nevertheless, many scholars have expressed skepticism as to the authenticity of this mesmerizing mammoth-sized document. A recent controversy in Mexico has again raised this issue, as a Spanish gallery purchased one of these Cardona fragments and has recently sold it for US$200,000. Upon the request of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, INAH, I inspected and analyzed the materiality of one of the purported fragments of the Codex Cardona in Mexico with portable spectrometry. I present in this poster the results of these scientific analyses and a tale of caution about one of the most elaborate forgery schemes known for Mexican manuscripts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35737.0