Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / 108: Rebirth of an Aztec Codex!

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108: Rebirth of an Aztec Codex! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: But you remember lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so why that's so why.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_04: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Astlantes, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help combat the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_04: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: And Ruben Ariano Tlacatecat.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: Man, Dr.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: Tlacateca, I will tell you one thing I do not miss about Texas, and it is the freaking heat.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Holy smokes.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: I've been working out just north of El Paso.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: We're staying in El Paso.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: In the part of El Paso that they call Northeast El Paso.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: Because for the listeners that don't know, El Paso was designed by a blind person who decided that it would be awesome to build this giant city.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_04: And you don't realize how big this freaking place is.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's very sprawled out, yeah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's uh sprawling.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: That's a good word for it.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_04: It sprawls out, and then and then you've got a mountain.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: SmackDab, the Franklin's like right smack dab in the middle of it, basically.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_04: So uh it it makes for uh an interesting layout.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_04: So we're staying in northeast El Paso, we're working near Chaparral, which is in New Mexico, so we just drive in and out every day.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: And one thing that I've noticed is that all these freedom loving Texans who moved from California to escape the tyranny of California and make it into Texas, they're now having to deal with the repercussions of their precious weed being turned into a felony.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_04: And as as soon as we get across the border into New Mexico, Chaparral has a booming weed business, right now.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_04: You just see dispensaries lining.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: As soon as you get across the border, it's not an exaggeration.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_04: There is just a row of dispensaries.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's a gold mine of of uh dispensaries.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just wondering, like, man, I wonder if if if the uh the freedom-loving Texans who who uh you know moved to Texas from California to escape tyranny, if if they see the uh the irony here, I was gonna say the irony on the So it's it's it's interesting that you say that because on the way back from New Mexico, when we uh visited over the summer, as soon as you get into like you're driving from New Mexico into Texas, like not even a mile in, like you start seeing the billboards, it is a felony to possess marijuana in Texas, and like, oh geez, calm down.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: We just we just got here.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: Give us a minute to actually Texas.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: God damn.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's crazy.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's crazy.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: But um, yeah, I mean, it's it's weird because like to me, as someone who taught at UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso for a year as a visiting uh scholar before I started here in Dallas uh college, um, it was a very interesting experience because a lot of the people out there don't really see themselves as Texans, Tejanos.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like the raza doesn't see themselves as Tejanos.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: They see themselves as being fronterizos or borderlanders, right?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: So they have their own sort of distinct identity that's unique to not even just you would think that it's like a shared borderland identity.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just a strictly El Paso Juarez part of uh the southern tip of New New Mexico kind of identity.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so I don't know about you, but I've always considered El Paso just to be technically part of New Mexico.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's not really in a lot of ways it is.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's like part of New Mexico and part of Chihuahua, you know, like it straddles that.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the feeling the feeling is mutual because I would ask my students who were from there when I was teaching at UTIP, and uh I would ask them how many of you uh consider yourself Tejanos, and like maybe one person would raise their hand, and it turns out that they were from like Laredo.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: They were even from everybody else is like, no, we're from Terizos, Professor, blah, blah, blah.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, that's interesting.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: So they don't have that identity that they share with the rest of Texas.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: And they they kind of see themselves in that area as being sort of uh neglected and ignored and dismissed by the rest of Texas, and so they've kind of adopted their own identity for themselves, which is fine.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to each his own.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: But it is a weird dynamic out in El Paso, I have to say.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's very different.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's a it's a strange vibe.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: It really is.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so we're out there, we're working in the Jornada, it's called the Jornada Mogallon uh cultural region.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: Mogallones, right.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: And there's a little museum dedicated to the archaeology of that area of Texas.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_04: And it's it's just right off um what is it, 54, I think it is, or Patriot Highway or whatever the hell they call it.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_04: And um we went there because I took the crew and I'm like, hey, we should check this out.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_04: We should familiarize ourselves with the archaeology of the region so we know what we're looking at, and blah, blah, blah.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_04: So we go in there and it's a really cool museum.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's very small, but it has an open like lobby area.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's tiny.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you have the little desk, you have like a little gift shop.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think I went to the I visited that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: I know what you're talking about.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_04: And off to one side, they have the exhibit hall where they have all the prehistoric stuff.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_04: And then off to the right, they have all of these dioramas, like these life-size dioramas.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, I remember that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're looking around, and one of the uh the people on my crew is like, hey, they have books for sale.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, oh, cool.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_04: So did you find something interesting?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I found some reports from the area.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I was like, oh, these will be great.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: I can take these back to the hotel, read about the cultural, you know, material of the area.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's located the bookshelf that I was looking at is like right in front of the checkout desk.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_04: And we had a security guard sitting there.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_04: And the security guard's just watching me.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_04: So like I talk to him a little bit and I'm thumbing through the books.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_04: I pull the books and I turn around and I see that the woman who checks you out, who runs the cash re the cash register, she's not there.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm just kind of like milling about the lobby holding these books, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I see the dioramas and I'm like, oh, those are cool.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: I like dioramas.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: So I walk over to the dioramas and I'm checking them out.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: Man, this security dude was on me like fucking lightning.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: Say that again.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_04: He just stepped up to me and was like, uh, excuse me, sir, are those our books?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, bro, you literally just watched me.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: Are you saying this happened at this little ass museum?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Are you kidding me?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_04: It's so he's like, are those our books?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm I'm gonna buy them.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I'm waiting for the woman to come back, the cat the cash register.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like, Well, you're not allowed to just walk around with books in your hand.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I was and they're like archaeological field reports.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: Like, who's gonna steal that?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_04: Who's gonna steal that?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_04: Come on, man.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_04: That is so ridiculous.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_04: And so I was like, you know what, man?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_04: And I just handed them to him and I was like, well, why don't you hold on to them for me?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: You're you hold them.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you hold them.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_04: So he he walked back, and you know, I I look at I'm I'm I'm I'm bugged, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, come on.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: You're patronizing their stupid little as a museum and they want to be jerks about it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell And I'm an archaeologist, and we're all wearing our field clothing.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_04: So it's we're not dressed like tourists.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_04: We're not dressed like people who just like, oh, yeah.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_04: Well, see, that's the problem.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they only ever get tourists there currently.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: So they see someone like you dressed like you're just coming from the field, they don't know who you are.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: You could be some some someone who is uh trying to steal uh precious documents and repatriate them for right.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_04: And so you know, the the lady comes back, and so I'm like, all right, let's get the hell out of here.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm walking up, and as I'm walking up, I uh one of the crew members hears the lady tell the security guard, like, is this the guy?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, what the fuck?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_04: So Is this the guy?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I I buy the stuff, we we leave.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's bugging me.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_04: And actually it bugged the crew a lot more than it was bugging me because they were like, that's fucked up.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: Because they're all, you know, I'm like the only brown dude there, right?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_04: And they're like, oh man, that's fucked up, that's fucked up.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_04: And then they start asking me questions, like, does that happen a lot?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_04: Like, what the hell, man?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_04: And um so I I make a post about it.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_04: As I'm wont to do.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_04: I just kind of vent a little bit on social media.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: And uh the director of the museum writes me a letter, and he's like, hey, just so you know, that guy was just doing his job.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: So not even to apologize, but to defend what happened.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_04: Are you freaking kidding me?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_04: And he said, you know, what happened there is you know because I said uh it the way I framed it in my post, I said, ah, good old-fashioned Texas racism, right?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_04: Like how I missed you, you know, because I used to live there.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_04: And um he's like, this was not an act of racism.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_04: He was just doing his job and blah, blah, blah.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, don't tell me how to fucking the implication that I'm too fucking stupid to know.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Or you're too you're being too sensitive, curly.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: You're being too sensitive.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the guy was there.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_04: So where have I heard that before?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_04: And so anyway, that's been my little adventure in Texas.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um I hate to say it, but I mean I enjoyed my time at El Paso, but it's not a place that you want to visit often.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Let me just put it to you like that.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'll I'll go visit friends and I'll go do uh you know, there there's there's uh a few places like Waco tanks that are meaningful to those of us in the tradición and whatnot.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: But besides that, like spending a whole lot of time in El Paso is not one of the things that I can't find a lot of.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you know what is speaking of uh, you know, repatriating objects.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_04: You like how I'm doing that little transition there.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_04: But you know what?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: Before I do the transition, I wanted to say something.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to thank all of our listeners who've been supporting us over the years.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: And uh and let them know that we appreciate you and that if they have not done so already, they should consider going to talesfromostlantis.com and for a mere five bucks a month becoming a premium member.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is it just still five dollars?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it's five bucks.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's a still just five bucks.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: You can't even buy a burger with five bucks anymore.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_04: Literally, you'd not like I don't even think you could get like fast food burgers and fries for five bucks.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_04: So for five bucks a month, you get to support the show, you get to support independent indigenous Chicano media, you get access to bonus episodes, you get a uh ad-free episodes, and you get access to our Discord server where we uh, you know, in interact with each other and have conversations and come up with ideas for future episodes.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just something that you, dear listener, can consider doing.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're already doing it, thank you.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh other ways you can help support the show is just by, you know, writing reviews, giving us ratings on whatever podcast server you're using.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: No rats, just raids.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: No, yeah.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_04: Keep the rants to yourselves.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_04: But with that being said, uh there's exciting news that I want to get to.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm calling this episode Rebirth of a Nastec Codex.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_04: There are some stories from Mesoamerican history that when you first hear them sound almost too good to be true.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_04: Take for example the Tonalamat Albin.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_04: Now, for those not familiar, the story goes like this a sacred indigenous calendar survives the destruction of the Spanish invasion, vanishes into European collections where it gets passed from collector to collector and eventually ends up sitting in a French library, thousands of miles from where it was made.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_04: And then in nineteen eighty-two, a Mexican reporter walks into that library, presents fake credentials in order to examine the manuscript, and then promptly puts it in a briefcase and walks out with it, sparking an international incident.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_04: Now that would already make the Tonalamot Alban one hell of a story.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, why hasn't a movie been made about this incident?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: Someone, anyone, give me a budget and let's fucking go.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of all this slump that they're putting out there nowadays.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, have you seen any good movies lately, Curly?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: What is the best m movie you saw this year that you think was like, okay, this is the top one so far?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_04: So far, you know, that's that's that's hard to say.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_04: I did like, you know, I'm a horror guy, so I liked Obsession.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_04: I thought Obsession was cool and interesting.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: Plus, it has a Chicana lead in it, um, which I think is pretty badass.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_04: But uh yeah, um I haven't really seen a a whole lot.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_04: So we need to make this movie.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: Movies that stick out in my mind.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man, it would be amazing.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_04: Let's do this.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_04: What a great story.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_04: Hollywood, if you're listening.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, anyone.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_04: Let's make it happen, captains.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, dear listeners, somehow the story of the Tonalamat Albin just got even more awesome.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_04: New scientific testing has confirmed something scholars have debated for decades.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_04: The Tonalamat Alban really is a pre-quau temoc manuscript created before the Spanish invasion of Anahuac.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: Carbon fourteen analysis conducted through a collaboration between Mexico's Biblioteca Nacional de Anthropologia y Historia and the University of Colorado Boulder places its manufacture around the end of the 15th century, with 1494 proposed as a likely date.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_04: Scholars have wondered whether the manuscript might actually be a colonial era copy.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_04: Some considered it a relatively crude imitation of the Codex Barbonicus.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: Certain details in the painting, including the representation of a flower glyph and the layering of colors, had raised questions about when it was actually produced.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_04: The new dating gives us a much firmer answer.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: The manuscript was being made in indigenous Mesoamerica before the Spanish invasion.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_04: The new findings appear in a new book presented on August 29, 2026 at the International University Book Fair titled Tonalamat de Albin Nuevos Estudios Sobre un codice advini the adivinatorio, right?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_04: The volume brings together work by sixteen specialists in physics, chemistry, biology, archaeology, and history.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_04: So that's a pretty impressive lineup.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_04: The book grew from a 2023 symposium held at the National Museum of Anthropology and the Institute of Historical Research.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_04: Its studies examine more than the age of the manuscript.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_04: Researchers also studied the source of its raw materials, the origins of its paints, and later changes made to its painted pages.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_04: Other chapters examine images of deities and compare them with those in the Codex Barbonicus.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_04: Both manuscripts share religious and divination themes, along with similar pictorial features.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: The researchers estimate that the raw material used for the Tonalamar Albin may have been acquired or prepared around 1424.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: During the presentation, Baltasar Brito Guadarama, director of the National Library of Anthropology and History, explained that the analysis indicates that the document was produced at least after 1450.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: The radiocarbon dating gives us a variation of thirty or forty years before or after that year, which is why fourteen ninety-four is proposed.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Consequently, from a scientific standpoint, this is a prehispanic manuscript, which is significant.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: It is, right?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_04: And if anybody has access to this book, uh I was looking it up online trying to buy a copy, but I can't actually find it for sale anywhere yet.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe it hasn't been officially released.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, didn't you say the date on this uh when it was first uh revealed is the twenty-ninth of this year?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: So that's just not that long ago.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, just a few weeks ago.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_04: So but I mean they've the book is printed, like it's available.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: They presented it at this meeting, so hopefully it'll be for sale to the general public pretty soon.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_04: If anybody out there has a hookup, uh hit us up.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_04: Send us some schwag.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_04: So, dear listeners, what is the Tonalamot Alban?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_04: The Tonalamot Alban is a Mesoamerican calendrical manuscript consisting of eighteen screen folded pages made from a mate paper.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're watching video of this, I actually have a reproduction of the Tonalamat Alban sitting right here on top of my bookshelf.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_04: The surviving manuscript measures about four point eight six meters when it's unfolded, with each sheet measuring approximately twenty-four by twenty-seven centimeters.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_04: It was originally twenty pages long, although the first two pages have long since disappeared.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_04: It was designed to be read from right to left and contains the signs of the 260-day tonal puali, the sacred count of days, used for divination and understanding the qualities of each particular day, or tonali.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_04: Each section corresponds to a thirteen day period, which we now commonly call a trecena.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_04: And though we refer to it as a calendar, quote unquote, in the English language, let's be absolutely clear.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_04: This isn't just somebody's calendar hanging on the dorm room wall so they can remember what day it is.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_04: The tonal pali is a system for interpreting time itself.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_04: You see, days possess particular combinations of numbers and signs, and those combinations or tonalis carried consequences for human beings, for ceremonies, for daily decisions, and most importantly, ritual activities.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_04: The Tonalamat Albin contains images of deities or teteo, as I prefer to call them, and other symbols associated with these periods.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_04: This gives us a glimpse into a system in which time was understood as something powerful and consequential.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: Our ancestors were kind of badasses.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Well let me ask you this, Curly.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: If you read it backwards, um is it summoning uh the dead.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: What's it called?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: Back masking or back if you play a record backwards.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: So if you read the tonomat backwards, what is what happened to the phone?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_04: If you read it from left to right, it'll send you back in time.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_04: That would be dope.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: See, there's another movie.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_04: God damn it.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_04: Writing it down.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_04: The story of how this particular manuscript survived is as fascinating as what is painted on its pages.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_04: The long, strange journey of the Tonalamat Albin.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_04: Totonalamat Albin first appears in the historical record as a calendario idolatrico, an idolatrous calendar in an inventory of Mexican manuscripts collected by the Italian aristocrat Lorenzo Bottorini Benaducci.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_04: Sounds like a director.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like Benadu.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: What was the qualifications?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like is there like a like a minimum threshold?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like, okay, up to this point you're just rich an aristocrat.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: But once you get that just slightly above, you become a low level aristocrat.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: How does that work?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even know how that works.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I don't know.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_04: Do they level up like in video games?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_04: Do they collect coins?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_04: I guess literally they do collect coins until like Super Mario or something, and then they get to level up to the next one.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: Benaduccian.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: That name Benaduc just kind of rolls off your tongue.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of those cool names.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: I gotta say, Benaducci.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: There's a ring to it.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, his whole name, Lorenzo Bottorini Benaducci.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_04: It's like a character from the Sopranos or something.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_04: Bottorini arrived in New Spain in 1736 looking for money.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_04: Specifically, he had come to collect one thousand pesetas owed to Dona Manuela de Ocasilva Moctesuma, a descendant of Moctesuma Chocoyotzin, or Motexoma Chocoyotzin, who was attempting to recover an overdue pension.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: And I always found this bit of Mexican history interesting that the direct descendants of Motexoma actually qualified for pensions and became like they were granted like coats of arms in Spain.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I think it's almost like being knighted, right?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: And they're still like that lineage is still recognized in Spain.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember way back in the in the uh Mexica Eagle Society days when we had the forums?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: And remember there was uh I don't know if you remember this one cat from I don't know if they were from Spain or where they were from, who jumped in or hopped in the chat, as they like to say, and started going on about how he was a direct descendant of Matikusoma and how he was uh appealing to the the group to see if we would support him in an attempt to recover the throne of Mexico.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that?
• 23:53
  unknown: Yeah.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_04: He's like, guys, check this out.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like what?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my god, you guys.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like he was gonna lay claim to the throne of Tenochtitlan.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_04: And what's funny is uh if you look into genealogy, um there are actually like thousands of descendants of Moctepsoma living in Mexico.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell here in Texas too.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you see some of the Mexican conductor genealogy, and somehow it it always goes back to Cortes and Moctezuma.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Those two.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, really?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, whatever you say.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Yeah, yeah.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's interesting uh because we know that um Tequuipo had like this number of daughters and sons, and then they all went off and had families.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: And it doesn't take that many generations for it to like increase astronomically, right?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: So how many generations have passed since the the initial encounter?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: And 1521?
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: 1519 was the invasion, fifteen twenty one, fall of Tenochtitlan.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_04: I mean you're looking at like sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Seventeen or eighteen at this point, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I I believe so.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_04: If my math is correct, and it never is, so Boturina Bottorina arrives in New Spain looking to collect a pension for this descendant of Motorsoma Chocoyotzin.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_04: But instead of simply collecting the debt and going home, Bottorini became fascinated by the indigenous history of Mexico, and he began assembling one of the most important collections of many Mesoamerican manuscripts ever created.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_04: His collection included materials associated with the Nawa historian Fernando de Alba Istlilchochitl, among many other documents.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_04: Bottorini became so impressed with what he had accumulated that he described his collection asceed in all the mines of gold and silver in the country.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a me, a bottorini, bottorini.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: The Spanish colonial government eventually became impressed too, although for very different reasons.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_04: Seems like old Bottorini was uh operating outside of the law when he was collecting these manuscripts.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_04: Ah, of course.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_04: And he made some folks jealous.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: So Bottorini was arrested on January 31, 1743.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_04: His collection was confiscated, inventoried, and scattered throughout the colonial bureaucracy.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_04: He was then expelled from New Spain and sent back to Europe with little more than what he could carry.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_04: And even that did not go well.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_04: Pirates attacked his ship and took what possessions he had left.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_04: So this poor bastard.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_04: Man.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_04: Boturini, what's up, my man?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: According to the website Trafficking Culture.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, the codex passed into the hands of the local colonial government that had sold the document.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: A portion of the codex, pages nine through twenty, seems to have been sold in or after 1802 from the estate of Mexican astronomer Antonio de Leonigama to two traveling artists, Carl Nebel and John Frederick Waldeck.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: It is possible that Nebel purchased the Codex, then sold it on to Waldeck.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: Waldeck sold the Codex to Joseph Marius Alexis Albin in Paris in 1841.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Albin eventually obtained pages 3 through 8 of the Codex, but it is unclear when and under what circumstances.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: The complete document was purchased by Charles Eugene Espidon Coupil in 1889, along with 383 other Mesoamerican manuscripts from the Alban collection.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: The Alban Tonalamat was then donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris by Coupil's widow in 1898.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: So let's see history.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: Students, dear listeners, that's what we call provenance.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: You're tracing back in time the different people who held it, owned it, or um uh claimed it over the years.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's how you can tell if something is is real or not.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: When you see something just pops into existence out of nowhere, you have to question the provenance.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if they don't have a good record, then that's one red flag that points to this thing is likely a fraud of some sort.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, if you don't have a legitimate provenance that you can track it through time.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_04: And then provenience being just the place where it came from, like its place of origin is its provenience, but the provenance is the actual hand-to-hand.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't know about the provenience part of it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_04: I just knew about the provenance.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yes.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: So we use that in in archaeology to identify certain artifacts where you could be like, yeah, we so the provenience of this artifact would be like Tlatolorco or something, right?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_04: The very first original Yeah, the origin point.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_04: And then the provenance is how it wound up.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: The track record.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: From where it got to and from where it originated from.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_04: And like you said, that's how you could tell if something's legitimate, right?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_04: If you could track its pr uh its provenance.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_04: The manuscript had been created in an indigenous world in which its calendrical knowledge was part of a living intellectual and religious tradition.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_04: By the nineteenth century, it was moving through the hands of European collectors as an antiquarian object.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_04: Eventually it had landed in Paris, and for decades it seemed that that's where the story ended.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_04: But it wasn't Enter the Mexican.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, isn't that a name of a movie called The Mexican with Brad Pitt?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: Was it Brad Pitt?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't about a gun.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what it is?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: The gun is the Mexican?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think so.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_04: The Mexican gun.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: Good grief.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_04: Never seen it, obviously.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_04: On Friday, june eighteenth, nineteen eighty-two, a thirty-six-year-old Mexican journalist and lawyer walked into the French National Library in Paris to examine Mesoamerican manuscripts.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_04: His name was Jose Luis Castañeda del Valle.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_04: He had obtained permission to consult the manuscripts and presented the necessary credentials.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_04: Credentials that had been forged in order to present Jose Luis as a scholar of Mesoamerican documents.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_04: Once he was alone with the materials, Castañeda took the Tonalamat Albin, concealed it in his briefcase.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_04: That's one of the stories.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: There's multiple versions of how he got it out.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_04: And returned the manuscript's box and then walked out of the library.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_04: A few days later, or hours later, according on to whose story you're listening to, French library officials realized something was missing.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_04: The Tonalamot Albin had disappeared.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_04: And suddenly this ancient indigenous calendar was at the center of an international scandal.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_04: Like all great heist stories, there are different versions of how he managed to get the album out of the national library.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_04: According to the website Mexico lore.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what kind of security do they have?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's taking you days to realize something went missing.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Come on, people, get with it.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it's probably hours, like within a few hours, probably.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would think.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I would think the truer version of events.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: So again, this is from Mexico lore.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: He had been aided by the fact that the codex was stored as many such precious manuscripts are around the world, in its own bespoke box, which he calmly handed in empty along with other materials at the end of his visit, having concealed the original under his jacket, or was it a Sarape, as some claimed at the time?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Frank suggests that he cunningly swapped the original for a fine facsimile, the edition by Carmela Aguilera, which conveniently had just been published the previous year.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: We'll probably never know.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: But for the record, the BNF lists the Aguilera facsimile edition in its manuscript holdings.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that might be the actual one.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: But that's probably what he swapped for the original for.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so they just kept the facsimile.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, fine, I guess we'll do with this until we get the original back.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, until we get the original back.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_04: But that's awesome to also think that if you go there and you look at the facsimile, it's like that's the one that he stuck in and swapped out.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: What struck me too is that this journalist, this guy, uh our hero, um José Luis Castañeda del Valle, right, he probably became aware of the Tonalomarao being after having been become familiar with the book that had just come out by Aguilera, right?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's just kind of coincidental that the same year or the year before, whatever it was, that her book comes out, he all of a sudden gets this bright idea to pose as a scholar of Mesoamerican manuscripts and travel to France to re retrieve the manuscript, right?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of uh uh moving parts to the story that I don't know if a a lot of it's ever come out and and and uh so we might not ever know the full complete story about this.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell But again, what a great movie this would be, right?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_04: I could just picture this journalist like sitting somewhere and seeing the book uh with the the reproduction sitting on a bookshelf and he opens it and he looks through it and he's like, huh.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the good thing about good stories is that they can be a little open-ended and open-ended interpretation because you don't really have all the facts, so it could be this thing or it could have been this other thing.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you can play with that, right?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_04: Watch, somebody's gonna make a movie about it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_04: So we're not gonna get any credit at all.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_04: God damn it.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_04: Whatever the exact mechanics of the result was the same.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_04: Castañeda got the manuscript out of France and brought it home to Mexico.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_04: French authorities contacted Mexican authorities.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_04: Interpol became involved, Castañeda was eventually arrested at his home in Cancún on August 16, 1982, and the Tonalamat was recovered.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_04: Castañeda claimed that he had intended to return the manuscript to Mexico all along.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_04: He framed the act as an attempt to recover Mexican cultural heritage that had been taken out of the country.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_04: He told one reporter.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_04: It was stolen from Mexico, and now we have recovered stolen property.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_04: The French government, however, had a somewhat different interpretation.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_04: France demanded the manuscript's return.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_04: Mexico refused.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_04: The Mexican press largely treated Castañeda as a nationalist hero, while French officials regarded the incident as an outright theft.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: The dispute became a particularly strange collision between two competing ideas of cultural property.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: From the French perspective, the manuscript had been legally donated to the National Library in eighteen ninety eight.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_04: From the Mexican perspective, the manuscript had originated in Mexico and had passed through a long chain of colonial confiscation, private collecting, and European acquisition before reaching Paris.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_04: Those arguments still sound familiar.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_04: The modern debate over indigenous cultural heritage is full of objects that sit in European and North American museums because somebody acquired them under circumstances that indigenous communities today would regard as deeply problematic, as the kids would like to say.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_04: The Alban became an unusually dramatic example because somebody eventually decided to reverse the process himself.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: To nobody's surprise, French officials were not amused.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_04: After publicly denouncing the financial and intellectual imperialism of the United States.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_04: Of the United States, only a few weeks prior to Castañeda's rescue of the Alban, French officials made an exception when it came to themselves.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_04: So like just a couple of weeks before, France was talking shit about the U.S.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_04: uh being, you know, intellectual imperialism and financial imperialism.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_04: But when it came to themselves, they're like, well, hold on.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_04: Le wait.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_04: You have to make an exception for us.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_04: We're the good guys in all this.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: The following is from the article A Stolen Relic is a problem for Mexicans from the August 29th, 1982 issue of the New York Times.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, can we just pause for a minute and look at this date again?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: So August 29th is the is of this year is when you the book came out.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: The book came out, right?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so August 29th from 1982 is when this report came out.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then didn't he also conduct his activities in August?
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think so, yeah.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: So August, again, for those of you that are keeping track, is Chicano Heritage Month, but it's also a month where a lot of cool stuff related to our culture happened, like this thing here.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe we should add Castanela to the list of uh Chicano heroes.
• 41:59
  unknown: Yes.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: For August Heritage Month.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: So be it.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: It has been declared by the Council of Aslantes.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: From this day henceforward, Jose Luis Castanela del Valle is now a Chicano hero.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: So back to 1982, this is from the NYT uh article.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_02: The return of part of a national patrimony to the country of origin is a different issue, argued Pierre Henry Guignard, spokesman of the French embassy here.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: That can be discussed and negotiated at UNESCO.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: But here we're dealing with a common crime.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Our reaction is the same as Britain with the Falklands.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: There was a theft and we cannot accept a theft.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: Another foreign diplomat said that France's agreement to drop the case would set a dangerous precedent.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine the Greeks trying to steal the Elgin marbles from the British Museum, the Italians trying to steal the Mona Lucia from the Louvre, and so on?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: He asked.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: It could be chaos.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean what's going with the Elite?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: Want their shit back.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: Want their stuff back.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: How dare you people?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: The entitlement, I swear.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_04: You swine.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_04: In the end, the Tonalamat Albin has been rescued twice.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_04: The first time in 1982, when Jose Luis Castaneda walked into that Paris library, his actions forced an uncomfortable question into the open.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_04: Who gets to decide where indigenous cultural heritage belongs?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_04: And what happens when objects taken from indigenous peoples become trophies in European collections?
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_04: The second rescue took place decades later, just not long ago, in laboratories rather than libraries.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_04: Through carbon 14 analysis, scientists confirmed that the manuscript was produced in indigenous Mesoamerica before the Spanish invasion, most likely around 1494.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_04: That finding changes the story of the Tonalamad Albin in an important way because it is no longer merely a colonial era manuscript preserving memories of a world that had already been destroyed.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_04: It is itself a survivor of that world, carrying a fragment of indigenous knowledge across the catastrophe of the Spanish invasion, across centuries of theft, collecting and displacement, and across an international struggle over its ownership.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_04: Castañeda rescued the physical manuscript from Paris, and the scientists have now rescued something else, its historical identity.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_04: They have given us evidence that the hands that painted these pages belonged to people living within the pre-invasion indigenous world, and that the knowledge preserved in the Alban was not simply reconstructed after the conquest.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_04: Twice the Tonalamar Alban has escaped the fate imposed upon it.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_04: And while the French authority quoted in the New York Times article from 1982 might see its rescue as chaos, we here at Tales from Aslantes know what it really is justice.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: Justice.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: Justice.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: Is it justice or is it just us who celebrates this?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_04: Us.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_04: So I I love the story of this document.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_04: And seeing it uh verified uh as pre-quap demo is like just icing on the cake.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's like it's this whole new layer of of a way of looking at at this knowledge that was preserved.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_04: And the story is just so cool.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_04: Like I love this story.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_04: And it's it's funny because a lot of times I'll bring the story up because somebody will be talking about um Romero Vargas y Turbide and his alleged and the panthley, and like we should go rescue that, blah, blah, blah.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, well, you know, there is an actual object that was rescued.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um and we should like be amplifying that and learning about that instead of holding up these weird nationalist myths uh like the panthli.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it also kind of brings to mind um the supposed uh Penacho de Mopezuma that's held over in Vienna, Austria.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and again, back to our our uh archaeological hero from back in the day, um uh what's her name?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um Celia Nutal, right?
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: Celia Nutal.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like she wrote a whole uh study on this for the Peabody Museum Yeah in the eighteen hundreds.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like late 1800s or early 1900s, right?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: Where she like analyzed the actual pinacho before it was uh On display, right?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: And before it was fully reconstructed.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things that she found was that when they were looking at it, it was like completely like apart.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like it had come apart.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: All the gold had been stripped of it since very early on, because you know that's what Europeans wanted.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't care about the craftsmanship and the elaborate beauty of Pinacho.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted to strip it from its uh precious metals and and any gemstones that it might contain.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so all that was left was basically the fabric and the feathers and maybe uh uh whatever was used to tie, right?
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: Some the streaming.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: The feathers were like badly deteriorated.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_02: The feathers had been so badly deteriorated over time, because it'd been like over 400 years by that point, right?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so they reconstructed it.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_02: What people are seeing now when they go to the museum in Vienna is a reconstruction of what they think based on previous uh uh um uh um the depictions of it and and descriptions of it might have looked like.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: So they're looking at a replica of what an artist back not even a hundred and something years ago thought that the pinocho might have looked like when it was uh fresh and new, right?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so this idea that we need to go fight for that and bring it back, like to me it's like, what are you doing?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like it first of all it was recorded as a gift.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's supposed to be, I don't know if this is true or not.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: Again, going back to this idea of provenience versus provenance.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's my understanding that the pinacho was originally one of those gifts that was given to Cortes and his entourage when Mocte Suma was trying to get the Spaniards and the Allies to go away to not enter the Nostitlan.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: So if it was a gift, then it's a gift, right?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: If that's the actual story, why do you want it back?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, because it was a gift, why do you want it back?
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: Second of all, it's so badly in shape that you the trade-off that Vienna wants in return for the Pinacho is for Mexico to return the golden chariot of uh Maximiliano.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: So if you think about the trade, right?
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have a golden chariot, like a whole chariot, right?
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_02: Of gold, right?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it's uh a gold plated, it's probably gold plated, right?
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: So you have this chariot gold plated that it that Vienna wants in return for it repatriating this Penacho that's a reconstruction and that was originally a gift from Opisuma to Cortes.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to me, I don't think that's a that's a good trade-off, right?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have gold versus reconstruction, and it's not even most of it's not even the original featherwork.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's all like feathers that were brought in at a later date to reconstruct it.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's like very little, if any, of the actual original remains um in that.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_04: And so Celia Nutal, I was looking it up.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_04: It seems it was she wrote a paper called uh Standard or Headdress.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: Or headdress, yeah, that's the one I'm referring to.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: 1892 is what I think.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: That would have been around the time of the um the commemorations of uh of uh the Columbus uh discovery of so-called discovery of the Americas.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_04: So she uh you know she did this paper.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_04: She identified it as a feather uh standard, right?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, so not even a headdress, it was a standard.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's the question that in her in her essay is like, is it is this a standard or a headdress?
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because most people thought it was a headdress, but it was to her the way that it was it's more of a standard.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_04: And and she said that it it you know, based on her research, it it resembled the standards that were depicted in the codices.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_04: And the codices is what it what it what it matches.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_04: And it's funny because I like to bring up the ship of Theseus, right?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_04: This idea of it's this thought experiment of if you have this ship of Theseus and you're you're trying to move it or keep it, you know, whole, but it's so badly deteriorated that you repair it and you repair it over time to the point where it's all new wood and none of the original wood remains.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_04: Is it even the ship of Theseus anymore?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_04: This uh I'm I was excited when I when I saw this headline that they had finally done the uh C14 test to confirm the age.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: Carbon deaning.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_04: Because for the long, you know, the longest time, that's what people said, like, oh, it's a reproduction.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's I mean not a reproduction, but it's uh it's post-conquest, it's post-invasion.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell So I highlighted something um kind of early in in the script here.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: Let me go back to it.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the part where you bring up that some people consider it a relatively crude imitation of the codex Barbonicus.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: So can you explain why people think that it's a crude imitation of the Barbonicus?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Yeah.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_04: So if you look at the Barbonicus, the style it the Barbonicus and the Albin are are both tonal mats, like they're both uh divinatory calendars, right?
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_04: They both possess the same information, basically.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um so the thinking was we know the borbonico is an older document.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_04: And this one, because of the way that the paint was layered, like it had been painted over and fixed, that led people to think, well, this uh somebody must have sat down and copied the borbonico and then adjusted and fixed it uh along the way.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_04: Plus I you know, honestly, the imagery in the Tonalamad Alban when you think of like classic Mesoamerican codices, most people are thinking of the Mishtek codices, um like the Borgia, or they're thinking of the Laoud or the Mayor.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_04: And the Laoud and the Mayor are spectacular works of art, like holy shit, like painted by an absolute master.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_04: The Tonalamot Albin admittedly doesn't look as sharp and crisp as as like somebody who wasn't at that level of mastery is what it looks like.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_04: Somebody the the person who painted it wasn't exactly like a master in the way that the people who painted the Law uh were a master.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_04: And if you look at the two side by side, you'll see what I'm talking about.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I think people looked at the Albin and they were like, uh, the the style, it's not at what we would expect to see from a pre-Qwaltemok piece, you know, but there's so few that survive.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_04: So they're looking at the pieces that survived, and they're just seeing like this real uh narrow and limited example or sample of what these looked like.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: So they're comparing somebody who maybe wasn't that great of an artist, honestly, to somebody who was a master and saying, well, the person this this is obviously a copy, you know, just just based on skill level of the person who painted it.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Now the Borbonicos is accredited to which cultural group?
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good question.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh often, and the same for the uh for the album.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: Who which which cultural group are that is I want to attribute it to So the Albin is uh no no the borbonico we think is if not Mexica then certainly Nawa.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um and the same thing for the album.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell For the Albin.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_04: But we can't like pinpoint which specific group it came from.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_04: Not I cannot, but it doesn't mean that somebody hasn't.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_04: So let's I want to be clear like that.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_04: Like I don't know.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm hoping that if I get that book, somebody out there hook it up that it'll answer my questions.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like first you have to um look at which cultural group created uh each one of them, and then also look at the t at the age difference between the two.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_02: But it seems to me, I mean the Bodwonicos uh is it's understood to predate the Albin because Albin was considered to be post-invasion, but now that it's pre-invasion, are were they contemporaries, or is still the borwonico is the much older one?
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, you know, that's also a good question because I don't know when the borbonico has been uh dated to what date.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_04: So that's a good question.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like one of them obviously came first.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Because if it's true that the borbonico uh is predates the album, then it could be that someone might have been trying to copy the borbonicas and and they weren't probably the best artist uh but they were just trying to do like a replica of it, right?
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Could be.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean, you know, it's a tonal mut.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_04: And if it's from the same cultural group, it would contain the same information.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell But there was a lot of shared information uh across Mesoamerica, right?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, because it's my understanding, and I don't know if this is true or not, but like something that I remember from from previous uh readings was that the Mishtik were the first group to develop what we would consider writing that wasn't just pictorial, but that had like uh um like almost like a like a written system and uh like the way the Olmec were trying, like the epi Olmec were trying to do, right?
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: Or am I misremembering?
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because I thought it was the Mishtik who were the first who are credited to be like the first ones to do like a not an alphabet, obviously, but like a writing system that was more than just hieroglyphic pictography.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_04: That's a good question, man.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I know that the Olmec had the first written language and then but I'm not sure if the Maya or the Zapotec uh elaborate.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because they were both first.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: There were both the the Maya and the Mishtik were both like subsequent cultures after the Olmec, right?
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think that would be a good follow-up episode.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: Just get some more information on some of these codices and and do a little bit of comparison.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: But now that's a whole series on the codices.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: But now that the album is considered to be pre-invasion, that's gonna um add one more on the pre-invasion codec side of the count, right?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because it was first it was placed on the post because that's what most people thought that it it was post-invasion, but now that we understand that it's not, but it it's been radiocarbon dated to pre-invasion, then it that adds one more to the pre-invasion.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_02: And there's probably still stuff out there that people are holding on to in private libraries and collections.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: Or buried in someone's property somewhere in some old uh chest.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows, right?
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I wish I wish you had more of this stuff out there.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's just just like for instance, the the first week of of class, um uh we always begin with indigenous peoples, right?
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things that I just recently was uh lecturing to my uh students about was this idea that we would have more written records, especially in Mesoamerica, had the Spaniards not burned them all, right?
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like we would know more about their culture, what was going on, uh, their daily lives, and their systems of government, systems of education, um, systems of health, all this stuff that we sort of assume is modern because we have access to it.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: We have the privilege of having these things in in modern society.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: Those people had them as well, but we don't know to the extent that they had them is because you know the Spanish burned them all thinking that it was all the work of the devil, right?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_02: I guess there's religious zealotry that took took hold of these people's minds.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it's cool that we have what we have, but I wish we just had more.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and whoever's out there, if you're listening to this, if you happen to be a fan of of the show or someone um turned you on to this episode specifically because it we were talking about the codex uh Oban.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: And if you know of someone that's got some you know, a codex laying around under their bed, stashed away.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: Let us know.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: Family talk to that person.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: We'll keep you anonymous.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_04: Can you imagine what's out there?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_04: Holy smokes.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_04: Well, cool, man.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm uh it's good talking to you as always.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_04: And uh to our dear listeners, remember you can uh visit talesfromuslantis.com, sign up to be a premium member and help keep us rolling because we love doing this, but you know, it's it's work.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's it takes some it takes some doing.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_04: It takes research.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it takes time.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_04: And in next and until next time, remember the truth it's like medicine.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't always taste good but it is always good for you.