225:. Laura Matthew, an assistant professor of history, recognized what she describes as "the characteristic look of an indigenous land title from Mexico’s mid-colonial period, a mix of traditional pictographic narration and alphabetic text". She is not an expert in Zapotec, but knew someone who was: Oudijk at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma. He saw e-mailed photos of the Codex, and replied in an e-mail, "
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Sebastián van
Doesburg had run across academic reports from the 1960s indicating two documents from Santa Catarina Ixtepeji had been sold in the early 20th century, and had sought them ever since, in various archives of Europe, Mexico, and the United States. Van Doesburg published an article in 2000,
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In 2011, Baruth was organizing his office in preparation for retirement after 31 years with the AGS Library, including sixteen as curator. A staffer questioned him about the tattered old scroll, and he decided to pursue the mystery. He showed it to associate professor Aims McGuinness of UWM's
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Matthew recounts, "That’s when we knew we had something valuable... And luck played a part, because had already studied this type of document and that made for a fast identification." Armed with these clues, Baruth and colleagues found a 1917 letter from Place in the last five-ton batch of
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from the AGS original home in New York, which had not reached
Milwaukee until 2010. Baruth suspects that the Codex was hastily shelved because by the time it was acquired, the resources of the AGS Library were in high demand for documentation in the wake of the end of
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The scroll recounts the history of leadership and land ownership in that particular town in Mexico, and is believed by
Marquette's Laura Matthew to have been written in both the local and Spanish languages because its purpose was to
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and librarians have been conducting their own ongoing exploration of the enormous collection ever since. In 1995, AGSL curator
Christopher Baruth stumbled across a tattered scroll with both writing and pictures, but without any
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scholars Michel Oudijk and
Sebastián van Doesburg to have been one of two documents from Santa Catarina Ixtepeji which were sold in the early 20th century; specifically, the one sold by a
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named A. E. Place. Place, it is now known, sold the Codex in 1917 to the
American Geographical Society (AGS) for their library, at that time based in
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for the collection. "I had asked someone about it at that time,” he recalls, “but that person didn’t think it was anything of significance."
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Van
Doesburg, Sebastián (2000). "El Lienzo de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji; un documento pictográfico tardĂo de la Sierra Juárez".
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based on a low-quality black-and-white snapshot of a corner of the Codex, which picture he had found in the
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In 1978, the AGS Library collections, which include over one million items, including books, maps,
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accumulated by the society and its members, were brought to
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee's
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Matthew, Laura. "Lost and Found: Three hundred year-old
Mexican document found in Milwaukee"
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he couldn't identify, and in turn consulted with Laura
Matthew, a colleague at crosstown
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Wooooooooooooooowwwwwwww, Es el CĂłdice de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Department of History, who identified the document as one in both Spanish and an
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Historians@Work: A blog from Marquette University history faculty
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in early 2012, as the result of efforts of scholars at UWM,
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and ownership in the eyes of the bureaucracy of the
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190:Universidad Nacional AutĂłnoma de MĂ©xico
133:in Oaxaca named Rickards, a Mexican of
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16:Bilingual codex in Spanish and Zapotec
252:At the urging of Jim DeYoung, senior
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389:17th-century illuminated manuscripts
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50:recounting part of the history of
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399:University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
76:University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
25:CĂłdice de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji
370:from the AGS Library Flickr page
21:Codex of Santa Catarina Ixtepeji
118:Subsequent history of the Codex
106:. The two dates (1691 and 1709
368:Photos of the Tira de Ixtepeji
221:, who specializes in colonial
199:Museo Nacional de AntropologĂa
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172:from New York; in Milwaukee,
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192:and fellow scholar of
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404:Zapotec civilization
394:Mesoamerican codices
258:Milwaukee Art Museum
215:Marquette University
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384:History of Oaxaca
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242:World War I
203:Mexico City
166:memorabilia
152:Rediscovery
139:Californian
100:land titles
378:Categories
264:References
164:and other
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97:regularize
90:Background
62:region of
289:UWM Today
219:Milwaukee
54:, in the
29:bilingual
301:July 13,
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82:and the
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256:of the
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128:British
58:in the
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