New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

Rarity and Significance of the New Codices

• Commenters note how few Aztec codices survive (Wikipedia cited at ~39, with only a handful possibly pre-Hispanic), so three more is seen as a major expansion of the corpus.
• Even though these are colonial-era, they are still viewed as a substantial gain for understanding Aztec and early colonial history.

Palimpsest and Research Potential

• One codex is reported as a palimpsest; multispectral imaging shows erased, older Aztec text beneath.
• Discussion emphasizes that research is still preliminary, with hopes that this could effectively count as an additional codex if the underlying text is recoverable.

What These Codices Are and Who Wrote Them

• Questions arise about why documents like a church inventory and a town-founding map, with partly Spanish place names, appear in an Aztec codical tradition.
• Replies explain that post-conquest communities remained largely Indigenous; they adopted Christian institutions and Spanish naming while continuing to record local history and administration.
• Clarifications are given that “codex” means a bound book (on bark paper/parchment), not stone, and that Aztec writing was pictographic with debated phonetic elements.

Destruction of Indigenous Texts and Cultural Loss

• Strong focus on Spanish (and more broadly European colonial) destruction of Aztec and Maya books, often justified at the time as eradicating “idolatry.”
• Some highlight that Aztecs themselves destroyed earlier Maya works and crafted their own legitimizing histories, arguing that text destruction was common across powers.
• Others counter that the last link in the chain that burns nearly everything bears special responsibility.
• Comparisons are drawn to other knowledge losses (Library of Alexandria, lost European manuscripts) and to modern censorship, copyright barriers, and book destruction.

Moral Debate on Conquest and Culture

• Intense back-and-forth over whether Aztec practices (especially human sacrifice, including of children) made cultural “de-Aztecification” justifiable, with analogies to denazification, ISIS, and sati in India.
• Opposing voices stress that this logic easily becomes a blanket excuse for cultural eradication and that Spanish atrocities and extractive rule were also extreme.
• Broader disagreement appears over whether any culture “deserves” eradication and how much post-conquest Indigenous culture actually survived.

Preservation, Memory, and Media

• Side discussion connects the survival of codices to everyday memory: disappearance of digital photos, abandoned cloud services, and the fragility of online storage.
• Several describe personal strategies (printing photo books, using specific printers and labs) as a modern analogue to creating durable records.
• Others note that physical media also degrades and needs complementary preservation.

Museums and Further Interest

• Multiple comments praise Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology, especially its codices and Mesoamerican collections, as an essential place to see related material.