Estudios de la materialidad de los códices mesoamericanos: I. Apuntes para una historia de los análisis científicos

In the present text, we sketch for the first time a history of the scientific analyses, both invasive and non-invasive, performed on Mesoamerican pre-Hispanic and colonial pictorial manuscripts. Our historiographic effort, in which we stress the main phases of technological and interpretive advances, is aimed at contextualizing the results recently obtained in this field. Indeed, these results are shedding light on the practices of color production in ancient Mesoamerica, as well as on the existence of different technological traditions and on emic conceptions of the materiality of color. The present text constitutes the first part of a wider work whose second part (in this same volume) is aimed at outlining a history of those works which tackled the use of color on Mesoamerican manuscripts form a historical point of view.