Mesoamerican codices

This page gathers the surviving manuscript and monumental record of Mesoamerica before and around European contact: the four surviving Maya screenfold codices -- long strips of bark-paper folded accordion-style -- plus the much larger corpus of Maya monumental hieroglyphic writing (the Maya Hieroglyphic Database), Mixtec pictorial screenfolds, and Aztec pictorial and annotated codices, many of the last drawn or copied under colonial supervision.

Because Maya monuments in particular carry exact calendar dates, and because Aztec and Mixtec codices record tribute and genealogy pictorially, this corpus supports precise quantitative tests that purely textual traditions elsewhere cannot match. Maya continued fractions and Desynchronized stelae both look for numerical patterns -- continued fractions, desynchronized dedication dates -- hidden in how Maya inscriptions record time. LiDAR rank-size politics combines LiDAR-mapped settlement data with the political geography implied by the inscriptions, and Tribute travels light reads Aztec tribute lists as evidence about how lightly or heavily goods actually moved across the empire.