The archive survives as a bibliography

Claim (verbatim)

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, mestizo heir of the Texcocan royal house, built his histories — the Historia de la nación chichimeca above all — on what he called the original paintings of his ancestors, and he transmitted the tradition that Texcoco, the most lettered court of the Nahua world, had held the general archive of the land until fire at the conquest consumed it; the later, popular version that has Archbishop Zumárraga burning the Texcocan library rests on far thinner evidence and is treated here as contested. Two measurable shadows of the claimed archive remain. First, a bibliography of ghosts: the painted sources Ixtlilxochitl explicitly cites and describes, most of which correspond to no document now known. Second, a physical remnant with a single thread of custody: the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and the Mapa Tlotzin — the great Texcocan cartographic histories, dense enough that Jerome Offner could reconstruct Texcocan law from them — passed from Ixtlilxochitl's heirs to Sigüenza y Góngora, into the Jesuit college, through Boturini's confiscated museum, to Aubin's removal to Paris in 1840 and Goupil's collection, and so to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where the Amoxcalli project has digitized them. Every physical survivor of the claimed royal archive rode one fragile chain; everything that missed the chain survives, if at all, as a citation. Prediction: an audit of the pictorial sources explicitly cited or described across Ixtlilxochitl's works (O'Gorman's edition and apparatus) will find over half unmatchable with any extant pictorial document in the census literature, and every extant Texcocan pictorial of pre-conquest register will carry the single Sigüenza-Boturini-Aubin-Goupil provenance chain into the BnF's Fonds Mexicain (primary clause: the over-half ghost rate among cited painted sources; the verdict follows it). Kill: Edmundo O'Gorman's edition of the Obras históricas of Alva Ixtlilxochitl (UNAM, 1975-77) with its source apparatus, run against the BnF Fonds Mexicain catalogue, the Amoxcalli digitization (CIESAS), and the Glass-Robertson census provenience entries.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: an audit of the pictorial sources explicitly cited or described across Ixtlilxochitl's works (O'Gorman's edition and apparatus) will find over half unmatchable with any extant pictorial document in the census literature, and every extant Texcocan pictorial of pre-conquest register will carry the single Sigüenza-Boturini-Aubin-Goupil provenance chain into the BnF's Fonds Mexicain (primary clause: the over-half ghost rate among cited painted sources; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Edmundo O'Gorman's edition of the Obras históricas of Alva Ixtlilxochitl (UNAM, 1975-77) with its source apparatus, run against the BnF Fonds Mexicain catalogue, the Amoxcalli digitization (CIESAS), and the Glass-Robertson census provenience entries.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The materials are catalogued and the transmission of the surviving Texcocan pictorials (Codex Xolotl, Mapa Quinatzin, Mapa Tlotzin) along the single Siguenza-Boturini-Aubin-Goupil chain into the BnF Fonds Mexicain is fully documented, and O'Gorman's edition supplies the source apparatus that names Ixtlilxochitl's cited paintings. But the primary clause is the ghost rate — that over half of the pictorial sources he cites or describes match no extant document — and that audit has not been computed as such; Brian and others discuss his sources and their loss qualitatively without running the cited-source-against-census matching to a percentage. The immediate neighborhood is worked; the over-half arithmetic is the un-run study.

• Edmundo O'Gorman (ed.), Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Obras historicas, 2 vols. (Mexico: UNAM, 1975-1977), with source apparatus
• Amber Brian, Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.