The Madrid Codex

This volume offers new calendrical models and methodologies for reading, dating, and interpreting the general significance of the Madrid Codex. The longest of the surviving Maya codices, the Madrid Codex includes texts and images painted by scribes conversant in Maya hieroglyphic writing, a written means of communication practiced by Maya elites from the second to the fifteenth centuries A.D. Some scholars have recently argued that the Madrid Codex originated in the Petén region of Guatemala and post-dates European contact. The contributors to this volume challenge that view by demonstrating convincingly that it originated in northern Yucatán and was painted in the Pre-Columbian era. In addition, several contributors reveal provocative connections among the Madrid and Borgia group of codices from Central Mexico.

Gabrielle Vail is a research scholar at New College of Florida and co-editor, with Victoria Bricker, of Papers on the Madrid Codex. Anthony Aveni is the Russell Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University, editor of Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy (UPC), and author of Uncommon Sense, Empires of Time, and Behind the Crystal Ball (UPC).