The Códice de Santa María Asunción, Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc

$250 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Williams, Barbara J (1942- ) and H R Harvey Year: 1997 Publisher: University of Utah Press Place: Salt Lake City Description: xii+410 pages with 38 figures, 10 tables, appendix and page reproductions of the Códice de Santa María Asunción. Royal quarto (12 1/2" x 9 1/2") issued in maroon cloth gilt lettering to cover and spine. First edition. The Códice de Santa María Asunción is a native pictorial manuscript painted in the mid-sixteenth century. It records censuses of households and landholdings of twelve rural communities in Tepetlaoztoc, a pre-Hispanic city-state in the eastern Basin of Mexico. Drawn and bound as a book, the codex is artistically relatively uninteresting, with its page after page of stylized heads of households and rectangular agricultural fields, but its content is extremely important for what it reveals about the less well-known, commoner component of Nahua culture at the time of Contact. Representative of the rural countryside twenty years after the Conquest, it is one of the few extant documents that illustrate indigenous methods of record keeping described by sixteenth-century observers. The census and cadastral records provide a wealth of information on numerous aspects of native rural life, including demography, land tenure, social structure, settlement patterns, political and economic organization and cultural ecology. Because the codex records an unusually large corpus of individual, household, and locality level data, it provides a unique

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.