Authenticity and Scholarship

This is a status-arc case that moved from suspected forgery to ratified authenticity. The forgery case held that a modern faker could have assembled the book from the three long-accepted codices. The authenticity case accumulated against it: radiocarbon dating of the paper returned a range of 1021 to 1154 CE; the blue pigment was identified as genuine Maya blue, a recipe not reconstructed in the laboratory until the 1980s, after the codex had appeared; and it depicts deities and Venus-cycle details not documented in scholarship when it surfaced, which a forger could not have invented. A detailed 2016 reassessment by Michael Coe, Stephen Houston, Mary Miller and Karl Taube argued comprehensively for authenticity, and in 2018 Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History formally ratified it and renamed it the Maya Codex of Mexico.

The manuscript's content, a Venus-cycle almanac tracking the planet's synodic period for astrological and ritual timing purposes, is consistent with the kind of astronomical table found in the securely authenticated Dresden Codex, one of the arguments authenticity proponents have pointed to, since a forger working before Maya astronomical tables were well understood by outside scholars would have had to reproduce genuine Maya calendrical astronomy with a sophistication that seemed, to earlier skeptics, implausible for a modern fake. It is held today at the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico City under the custody of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. This atlas records the 2016 authentication as the current best scholarly position while noting that, as with any object lacking a fully documented excavation history, some residual caution among specialists persists.