The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript

Chapter 12: Screenfold Manuscripts of Highland Mexico and Their Possible Influence on Codex Madrid

Screenfold Manuscripts of Highland Mexico and Their Possible Influence on Codex Madrid: A Summary JOHN M.D. POHL I have spent many years considering how the screenfold manuscripts we call codices can be analyzed within broader cultural frameworks through interdisciplinary study, and I continue to look for ways to transcend the limitations of single viewpoints rooted in archaeology, art history, religious studies, or any of the other specializations fostered by our department-based institutions. I am concerned that academic specialization emphasizes divisions in our intellectual understanding that were not necessarily shared by the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations we study; the distinction between so-called ritual codices of prognostication versus retrospective historical codices is a good case in point. Consequently, I was delighted when Gabrielle Vail andAnthonyAveni asked me to read and comment on the extraordinary papers presented in this new examination of Codex Madrid by such a diversified group of scholars. One of the aspects that intrigues me most is the recognition that Maya scribes could have blended historical accounting and ritual prognostication in such a C H A P T E R 1 2 JOHN M.D. POHL 368 variety of ingenious ways. The implications of this research may have a dramatic effect on how we study the codices of the Borgia group and of the Mixtec group as well. In their introduction to this volume, Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni review the history of Codex Madrid, as well as its physical and intellectual construction. The manuscript first came to the attention of European scholars during the 1860s, truly the era of discovery for academic studies of these remarkable artifacts. Only twenty years earlier Lord Kingsborough had completed a massive ten-volume publication that brought together for the first time reproductions of codices produced by Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya Indian scribes. The distribution of facsimiles throughout Europe and North America allowed scholars to quickly grasp the inestimable value of the codices, but even more important it enabled them to contrast and compare the ritual and intellectual perspectives of Mesoamerica’s cultural co-traditions. In so doing, they identified both surprising similarities and differences in style, form, and construction; the use of pictographs combined with a sophisticated hieroglyphic writing system by the Maya was particularly notable. Given the fact that codices were rediscovered among European collections of antiquities and that they seemed to fit colonial descriptions of indigenous “books,” few scholars have ever doubted that Codex Madrid was not representative of the kinds of documents being produced by the Maya during their first encounters with Europeans. At this time the Maya were organized into leagues or confederacies of small states, a factional situation comparable to central and southern Mexico up to the time of the Aztec Empire. In the south, the Quiché and Cakchiquel had risen to power, establishing mountaintop military strongholds at Utatlán and Iximché (Carmack 1973; Fox 1987). They rivaled one another for dominance of the Guatemalan highlands and made incursions into the Pacific Coast where they encountered Nahua Pipil trading centers connected to Cholula through Puebla’s Tehuacán Valley, Zapotec expansionism from Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, and the vanguard of Aztec pochteca from the Basin of Mexico. Polities were only loosely integrated in territorial terms. Instead, administration was focused on a great house, called the chinamit in Quiché, where social prestige among the elite was earned as much by increasing the wealth of the polity as by membership in any lineage-based organization (Hill and Monaghan 1987; Braswell 2003a). Aggressive rivalries were offset by royal intermarriages, as well as by elaborate ritual strategies for power sharing divinely ordained by the ancestors in creation stories like the Popol Vuh or the Anales de Cakchiqueles. The Yucatán Peninsula to the north had always been a discrete cultural zone, but it was the most densely settled, prosperous, and socially complex of the Maya confederacies at the time of the Spanish invasion. Here the Cocom, the Xiu, and the Itzá, among others, founded an astounding religious and ad- SCREENFOLD MANUSCRIPTS OF HIGHLAND MEXICO AND THEIR POSSIBLE INFLUENCE 369 ministrative center at Chichén Itzá in the ninth century by establishing a special economic relationship with the Toltec of the Basin of Mexico (Andrews 1993; Kepecs, Feinman, and Boucher 1994). However, the central ceremonial complex was abandoned within 300 years for reasons that are hotly debated by archaeologists. The Itzá subsequently reorganized themselves in the central Petén. They...