Codex Xolotl and Mapa Quinatzin Technical Photography of Aztec manuscripts in Paris
CHSOS was recently asked to perform Technical Photography documentation of the Codex Xolotl and Mapa Quinatzin at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Bothdocuments date to about 1540 AD. Both have European writing in the Aztec language, Nahuatl, on them that is no longer legible. They also hve corrections to non-alphabetic indigenous writing with the potential to become legible through Technical Photography .
Dr Jerry Offner is Associate Curator of Northern Mesoamerica at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and he heads a volunteer group of scholars from France, Spain, Poland and Germany that has been studying the document and holding meetings on the document for nearly five years. Some members of the group having been studying the documents for more than four decades.
He got in contact with CHSOS to go to Paris and scan the document with Technical Photography.
The Codex Xolotl is the best example we have of Aztec historiography—their distinctive rules and methods for writing history. It portrays events from the 13th through the 15th century, ending nearly a century before Spanish contact. Its different pages or leaves were considered so important by the Aztecs that they were copied over and over across the contact boundary of 1519-1521 and assembled into what we call the Codex Xolotl by about 1540.
