Antiquity, made to order

Claim (verbatim)

Around the turn of the eighteenth century, central Mexican towns began producing 'ancient' books to order: the Techialoyan codices, a corpus of dozens of manuscripts on native amate paper, painted and written in a deliberately archaizing manner, narrating each town's founding, its boundary walk, and its grants from pre-conquest lords. Donald Robertson defined the group and catalogued it in the Handbook of Middle American Indians; subsequent scholarship (Xavier Noguez, Stephanie Wood) anchors production to roughly 1685-1735 — precisely the decades when the Crown's composiciones de tierras made documented antiquity a purchasable legal asset and boundary disputes made it a communal necessity. The mechanism is a demand shock meeting a documentation gap: communities needed papers their ancestors had never made in the form the colonial land regime now required, or had lost, and workshops arose to manufacture the past to specification — a forgery industry in the strict sense, but one whose product is an irreplaceable record of what late-colonial Nahua communities believed a pre-conquest book should look like. Manufacture is datable because the forger's world leaks: late orthography, Spanish loanwords, saints, paper stocks, and repeated hands and templates crossing town boundaries. The genre is thus the hemisphere's cleanest case of loss generating its own counterfeit — the missing archive conjured back into existence by the legal system that demanded it. Prediction: among Techialoyan manuscripts with a defensible production date in the published catalogues, over 80% will fall within a single fifty-year band (approximately 1680-1735) while narrating events set at least 140 years before their manufacture, and shared-hand or shared-template links will connect manuscripts of at least ten different towns (primary clause: the over-80%-in-fifty-years production concentration; the verdict follows it). Kill: Donald Robertson's Techialoyan census in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (1975), with the catalogue updates of Xavier Noguez and the títulos scholarship of Stephanie Wood (Transcending Conquest, 2003), and the AGN Tierras files in which individual codices served as evidence.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among Techialoyan manuscripts with a defensible production date in the published catalogues, over 80% will fall within a single fifty-year band (approximately 1680-1735) while narrating events set at least 140 years before their manufacture, and shared-hand or shared-template links will connect manuscripts of at least ten different towns (primary clause: the over-80%-in-fifty-years production concentration; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Donald Robertson's Techialoyan census in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (1975), with the catalogue updates of Xavier Noguez and the títulos scholarship of Stephanie Wood (Transcending Conquest, 2003), and the AGN Tierras files in which individual codices served as evidence.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The over-80%-in-fifty-years concentration is the defining, published characterization of the Techialoyan group: Robertson's catalogue and the successor scholarship (Noguez, Wood) date essentially the whole corpus to roughly 1685-1735 and tie it to the composiciones de tierras window, while the shared hands and repeated templates crossing town boundaries are the recognized signature of a Techialoyan 'school.' A reader of Robertson and Wood already knows the corpus clusters in a single narrow production band narrating far older events, which is exactly the primary clause. Only the precise percentage and the ten-town shared-hand tally are uncomputed; the concentration answer is in print.

• Donald Robertson, 'Techialoyan Manuscripts and Paintings, with a Catalog,' Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975)
• Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.