Photo: Detail of the codice. In a 1917 letter to the AGS, the seller, California mining engineer A. E. Place, wrote: “Were it not for the fact that I am forging into business here, after having lost nearly all my property in Mexico, I would not sell the map at any price.” [Credit: Alan Magayne-Roshak] SOURCE
July 7, 2012
Posted by TANN
A rare 17th-century Latin American document that was “lost” for nearly a century resurfaced earlier this year. The kicker: It was right where it should have been all along — in the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
But it’s a wonder that the document — a pictorial history-map of Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, a village in Mexico — was rediscovered at all.
The 7-foot-long painted scroll is one of the few known pictorial documents that contain text in the indigenous Zapotec language. It had been in the hands of private collectors early in the 20th century, including California mining engineer A.E. Place, who sold it to the AGS in 1917 for $350.. . . Read Complete Report
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