Exhibition Mesoamerican Codices – CEMAA – Centro de Estudos Mesoamericanos, Amazônicos e Andinos

Exhibition Mesoamerican Codices - FFLCH USP

Mexican codices: images, writing, debate was the first public exhibition in Brazil about famous books made by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica in the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods. These manuscripts were very common in this region and were present in different types of social situations. The tonalamatl, or account books of the days and fates, were used by specialized sages to make predictions on the most diverse subjects, such as the fate of a new-born child or the fate of a group that intended to wage war or conquest. The xiuhamatl, or books of the years, related group stories from the point of view of the ruling elites, generally their main producers. There were other types of codices, which contained cosmological narratives, tribute records, or astronomical cycles. Currently, the original Mesoamerican codices are found in libraries and archives of European countries, the United States and, mainly, Mexico itself, where also some codices belong to current indigenous communities and constitute objects of conformation of their community identities.

Through the exhibition of facsimile editions of these manuscripts, accompanied by explanatory material and lectures, the exhibition Mexican Codices: writing, images and debates helped students, researchers, professors and other interested to learn a little about the history and culture of the Amerindian peoples who produced these books, which, unfortunately, are often objects of little attention or strong prejudice by a significant part of Brazilian national society.

The exhibition took place between the 24th and 30th of July 2017 at the Eurípedes Simões de Paula building of the Faculty of Letters, Philosophy and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo and featured the exhibition of ten Mesoamerican documents. Similar facsimile editions of many of these indigenous manuscripts are available in the USP libraries, such as the Florestan Fernandes Library (Codices Borgia, Cospi, Borbónico, Vatican B, Vindobonense, Dresden, Zouche-Nuttall and Chimalpopoca) and in the Library of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (codices Azoyú, Borgia, Laud, Cospi, Vindobonense, Fejérváry-Mayer, Zouche-Nuttall, Egerton or Sanchez Solís e Becker II, Xicotepec, Mendoza, Matrícula de Tributos, Dresde).

What does “Mesoamerica” mean?

The concept of Mesoamerica refers to a large area of indigenous America, whose delimitation is based on cultural characteristics and historical processes that would have been shared by countless populations in the pre-Hispanic period and whose validity would extend into the colonial period. The most mentioned historical and cultural characteristics to define the Mesoamerican peoples are: the cultivation of corn as a food base, the production of paper and pulque (fermented alcoholic beverage) from agave (maguey, plant of the same family as sisal) , the use of self-flagellation practices and human sacrifices for political-ceremonial purposes, the cultivation of cocoa, the construction of stepped pyramids, the practice of ball game and the production of wooden weapons with edges of stone blades, mainly obsidian and flint. In addition to these characteristics, there are others, more linked to the field of thought: the use of a precise calendar system based on two concomitant cycles, the conviction of the existence of several suns or previous ages in the world, the division of the horizontal space into four directions and a center and vertical space in thirteen heavens and nine underworlds, the production of books and the presence of three linguistic trunks (Macro-Otomanguean, Macro-Mayan and Uto-Aztec).

Geographically, the peoples who shared these common characteristics inhabited, in pre-Hispanic times, the region that goes from the center of Honduras and northwest of Costa Rica to Mexico, where its limits are the States of Tamaulipas (Rio Soto la Marina) and Sinaloa (River Fuerte), and from one sea coast to the other. This unity is remarkably noticeable from the so-called Classic Period (beginning of the Christian era to the ninth century) until, at least, the seventeenth century.