Closeup of the
300-year-old scroll showing property ownership.
Historical detective work solves
mystery of old Mexican scroll
By the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee news service
A rare 17th-century Latin American document that was lost for nearly a
century resurfaced earlier this year. The kicker: It was right where it
should have been all along – in the American Geographical Society
Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
But it’s a wonder that the document, a pictorial history-map of Santa
Catarina Ixtepeji, a village in Mexico, was rediscovered at all.
The 7-foot-long painted scroll is one of the few known pictorial
documents that contain text in the Zapotec language. It had been in the
hands of private collectors early in the 20th century, including
California mining engineer A.E. Place, who sold it to the American
Geographical Society in 1917 for $350.
In a 1917 letter to the society, Place, wrote: “Were it not for the
fact that I am forging into business here, after having lost nearly all
my property in Mexico, I would not sell the map at any price.”
Fast forward to 1978. The society collection moved from New York to the
university, where archivists have been piecing together the stories of
the more than 1 million items in the collection bit by bit over the
last 34 years. The contents include maps, globes, diaries and other
memorabilia gathered by the society’s member-explorers, from Charles
Lindbergh to Teddy Roosevelt.
In 1995, society library curator Christopher Baruth came across a
tattered scroll containing both writing and pictures. There were no
markings on it to link it to a card in the collection’s catalog. “I had
asked someone about it at that time,” he remembers, “but that person
didn’t think it was anything of significance.”
That could have been the end of the story. Baruth formally retired in
2011 after 31 years with the society, 16 as curator. After fielding a
staff member’s question about the scroll while organizing his office,
Baruth decided to get a second opinion.
He called Aims McGuinness, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate
professor of history, who could tell that the scroll was written in
both Spanish and a native language. To home in on its origin,
McGuinness consulted with someone who specializes in colonial Latin
America, and she was just downtown at Marquette University.
Laura Matthew, an assistant professor of history, remembers being
psyched to see the mystery document, which, she says, recounts the
history of leadership and land ownership in a specific town in Mexico.
“It continued an older tradition of documents kept by royal houses that
were intended to accompany an oral presentation, like a visual aid.”
The document was written in both the native and Spanish languages
because it would have been used to legitimize land ownership in a
bureaucratic process involving Spanish officials. Two dates inscribed
on it, 1691 and 1709, were probably the dates it was used, Ms. Matthew
surmises.
Ms. Matthew is not an expert in Zapotec, but she knows someone who is.
Michel Oudijk at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México knew exactly what the scroll was from looking at emailed
photos, and he knew because he had been looking for it for more than a
decade.
“That’s when we knew we had something valuable,” says Ms. Matthew. “And
luck played a part, because he had already studied this type of
document and that made for a fast identification.”
professors
Oudijk and colleague Sebastián van Doesburg had found scholarly
reports from the 1960s indicating two documents from Santa Catarina
Ixtepeji had been sold in the early 20th century. One was sold by a
British consular official in Oaxaca named Rickards, a Mexican of
Scottish descent. But the research did not reveal that mining engineer
Place was the buyer or that it had ended up at the American
Geographical Society.
That information came some 50 years later when curator Baruth consulted
the last batch of archival material – 10,000 pounds of it – that
arrived in Milwaukee from New York in 2010. He unearthed a letter from
Place, dated 1917, stating the price he wanted for his piece of
antiquity. It provided the final piece in the puzzle of how the rare
scroll had found its way from Mexico to Milwaukee.
“This has been invaluable to teach students about the impact of
research,” says McGuinness. “My students could see knowledge being
produced and the cooperation among institutions that made it happen.”
Baruth believes that Place probably secured the artifact from Rickards,
as the two were both in the mining community around Oaxaca.
By the time Place wanted to sell the artifact, the society was
preoccupied with boundary disputes in Europe as World War I drew to a
close. Baruth suspects that’s why the document entered the collection
with little notice. It was mostly likely shelved without sufficient
identification and forgotten.
The discovery and identification of this piece illustrates the value of
the work by librarians, archivists and the global community of
scholars, says McGuinness.
“This is more than just a curiosity,” he says. “This document tells us
in the present something about Mexico that we would not otherwise have
known. So UWM is part of a circuit that creates and disseminates
information of worldwide significance.”
Collaboration extended beyond the academic. Jim DeYoung, senior
conservator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, advised that the scroll never
be rolled again. He designed and constructed the frame that it is now
displayed in.
Through it all, McGuinness’ and Matthew’s students witnessed the
mystery unfold. “This has been invaluable to teach students about the
impact of research,” says McGuinness. “My students could see knowledge
being produced and the cooperation among institutions that made it
happen.”
