Zero books from the Basin

Claim (verbatim)

The Mexica state was a paper state — tribute rolls, ritual books, annals — and its own historiography records the first burning: under Itzcoatl, says the tradition set down by Sahagun's Nahua informants, the lords destroyed the old books so that the people would not know. The conquest finished the work at the center. The Glass-Robertson Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts catalogues over four hundred documents of the native pictorial tradition, and read as a survival table it is brutal: the certainly pre-conquest pieces are a rounding error, and none is securely from the Basin of Mexico — the Borgia group belongs to the Puebla-Tlaxcala-Mixteca sphere, the Maya books to Yucatan, and the Codex Borbonicus stands as the lone disputed Basin candidate — while the colonial hundreds show the craft surviving by re-tooling itself for courts, tribute disputes, and friars. Total archive loss at the imperial center, production continuing everywhere under new patronage: that is the shape of the census. Prediction: classified against the Glass-Robertson census, documents judged wholly pre-conquest will be under 4% of entries; none will carry a secure Basin-of-Mexico provenience, Borbonicus remaining the single disputed case; and native-tradition pictorials produced under colonial rule will exceed 85% of entries (primary clause: zero securely pre-conquest documents of Basin-of-Mexico provenience; the verdict follows it). Kill: John B. Glass with Donald Robertson, A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts, in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (1975) — entry-level dating and provenience classifications; the computation is three counts over the census entries.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: classified against the Glass-Robertson census, documents judged wholly pre-conquest will be under 4% of entries; none will carry a secure Basin-of-Mexico provenience, Borbonicus remaining the single disputed case; and native-tradition pictorials produced under colonial rule will exceed 85% of entries (primary clause: zero securely pre-conquest documents of Basin-of-Mexico provenience; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: John B. Glass with Donald Robertson, A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts, in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (1975) — entry-level dating and provenience classifications; the computation is three counts over the census entries.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The census-level result is published: the Glass-Robertson survey itself states that only about sixteen of its 400-plus manuscripts are considered preconquest, and Boone states that no pre-conquest book securely survives from the Basin of Mexico (Borbonicus the disputed case), the craft surviving in colonial hundreds. The conjecture's three counts re-derive the census's own published statistics.

• J.B. Glass (with D. Robertson), 'A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts', in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (University of Texas Press, 1975)
• E.H. Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (University of Texas Press, 2000)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.