Almanacs for Bees, Deer, Rain and Offerings

The content is more ordinary than the surviving codices are often taken to be. Alongside the divinatory tables that set the days of the sacred count against deities and the offerings due to them, there are almanacs concerned with beekeeping, with deer hunting and trapping, with planting, with weaving and with the making of images. The book is a working reference for a specialist whose responsibilities covered the practical year as well as the ritual one, and it does not separate the two. That combination is the historical value of it. Inscriptions on monuments record dynasties and rites; this records what the calendar was for in the life of a community, which the monuments never say. Its date is disputed and the dispute has an unusual piece of evidence in it.

The codex is generally placed in the late Postclassic period, but a fragment of European paper was found incorporated into one of its pages, which has been used to argue for a date after Spanish contact and to suggest the book was still in use, or being made, under colonial conditions. The atlas records the late Postclassic attribution as the standard view and the post contact argument as a live minority position rather than a settled correction.