Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH)

The Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia was founded in 1939 to consolidate Mexico's archaeological, anthropological and historical heritage functions under a single federal body, replacing a more fragmented earlier arrangement of separate departments and academic societies. Rather than operating a single flagship museum, INAH oversees a national network of museums and archaeological zones, which is why the three objects grouped under its custodianship in this atlas were acquired through entirely different routes and are displayed at different sites: the Aztec Sun Stone at the National Museum of Anthropology, unearthed during colonial-era construction work in Mexico City's main square in 1790, long before INAH existed to receive it; and the Coyolxauhqui Stone at the Templo Mayor site museum, found only in 1978 when electrical utility workers accidentally struck it during excavation for underground cables.

This structure means INAH functions less like a single collecting institution with one acquisitions history and more like a national regulatory and curatorial authority that absorbed pre-existing finds and continues to receive new ones as excavation continues across the country. Its authority extends beyond display to authentication, which is why INAH's own institutional judgment features directly in disputes over other Mexican antiquities, including manuscripts whose authenticity institute researchers have been asked to assess.

INAH's authority was tested directly by the Maya Codex of Mexico, formerly known as the Grolier Codex, which surfaced privately in the 1960s under circumstances that left its authenticity disputed for roughly four decades: critics argued a modern forger with knowledge of the three long-accepted Maya codices could have assembled a plausible fourth, while defenders pointed to radiocarbon dating of its bark paper and pigment analysis consistent with a genuine pre-Columbian date. As the country's official authority on Mexican antiquities, INAH conducted its own extended technical study and formally authenticated the codex in 2018, a ruling that carried institutional weight precisely because it came from the national body responsible for such determinations rather than from an interested private owner or a single outside academic.

This authenticating role sits alongside INAH's more straightforward custodianship of excavated material such as the Sun Stone and the Coyolxauhqui Stone, whose Mexica origin has never been seriously disputed, and illustrates a distinction worth holding onto: for some of INAH's holdings the institute is simply the excavating authority that took possession of a find, while for others, like the codex, it has additionally had to act as an evaluating body settling a genuine question of fraud, a role most museums in this atlas are never asked to perform for their own collections.