History and Provenance

For four decades the codex sat under suspicion, reportedly recovered from a cave in Chiapas but without any controlled archaeological context. It is one of only four surviving Maya codices, the others being the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices, all of which reached Europe in the colonial period. The Maya Codex of Mexico is now held by the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico City under the National Institute of Anthropology and History, and on the strength of its radiocarbon date it is described as the oldest surviving manuscript of the Americas.

Long treated with suspicion by some Mayanist scholars, who questioned both its unclear origin and stylistic peculiarities compared to the three other securely accepted pre-Columbian Maya codices, the manuscript was radiocarbon-dated to a range of 1021 to 1154 CE, placing it in the Early to Middle Postclassic period, and later technical and iconographic analysis, notably work published around 2016 by Michael Coe and colleagues, argued strongly for its authenticity, a conclusion that has shifted, though not entirely settled, the scholarly consensus toward accepting it as a genuine pre-Columbian document. Its authentication has accordingly been treated by Mayanist scholarship as a gradual process of accumulating evidence rather than as a single decisive proof.