The courtroom kept the ledgers

Claim (verbatim)

The Aztec empire ran on fiscal paper: a calpixqui steward in every tributary province, schedules by the eighty-day period, and painted registers of the class the Codex Mendoza's second part re-creates for the viceroy — a class whose sole surviving pre-conquest-style exemplar is the Matrícula de Tributos (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología). Nine decades of administration across some thirty-eight provinces implies fiscal-document production in the thousands; the central genre survives in roughly one exemplar plus one colonial copy. The losses are not uniform, though, and their pattern names the mechanism: fiscal pictorials survive where a continuing institution had a filing obligation, and in New Spain that institution was the court. The Huejotzingo Codex survives because it entered Hernán Cortés's 1531 litigation against the First Audiencia (Harkness Collection, Library of Congress); the Codex Osuna because it entered the 1565 visita against viceregal officials; the Memorial de Tepetlaoztoc because it carried a tribute grievance against an encomendero to the crown; the Guerrero tribute records of the Azoyú group and Humboldt Fragment 1 because colonial fiscal disputes kept them in play. The empire's own archive had no successor institution and vanished almost whole; the litigated edge survived. Survival, in this genre, is simply the shadow of jurisdiction. Prediction: in the Glass-Robertson census, among pictorials classifiable as economic (tribute, cadastral, census), entries with a documented colonial legal or administrative deposit context will outnumber entries without one by at least three to one, while the empire-wide tribute register proper counts at most two exemplars — the Matrícula and the Mendoza's copy of its class (primary clause: the three-to-one litigation-context ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: the economic-category entries of the Glass-Robertson census (Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 14-15, 1975), with the Library of Congress Harkness Collection digitization of the Huejotzingo Codex and the AGN Tierras and Vínculos series as the deposit-context control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Glass-Robertson census, among pictorials classifiable as economic (tribute, cadastral, census), entries with a documented colonial legal or administrative deposit context will outnumber entries without one by at least three to one, while the empire-wide tribute register proper counts at most two exemplars — the Matrícula and the Mendoza's copy of its class (primary clause: the three-to-one litigation-context ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the economic-category entries of the Glass-Robertson census (Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 14-15, 1975), with the Library of Congress Harkness Collection digitization of the Huejotzingo Codex and the AGN Tierras and Vínculos series as the deposit-context control.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The individual survival-through-litigation stories are famous and documented case by case — Huejotzingo in the 1531 Cortes suit (Harkness Collection), Osuna in the 1565 visita, the Memorial de Tepetlaoztoc, the Azoyu group, Humboldt Fragment 1 — and the near-total loss of the imperial tribute register (Matricula plus the Mendoza copy) is textbook. What the primary clause asks is the specific three-to-one ratio of deposit-context to no-deposit-context entries across the economic category of the Glass-Robertson census, and that classification has not been run to a number. The mechanism (jurisdiction as survival filter) is argued in print; the ratio census over the catalogue is the un-run test.

• John B. Glass with Donald Robertson, 'A Census of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts,' Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 14-15 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975)
• Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.