The Codex Boturini is housed under protective glass in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology. The original object consists of 21 1/2 folios made of amatl, a paper made from fig tree bark. Seeing the document in person allows for a sense of its antiquity and the talent and knowledge of the Indigneous scribes who made it. But the object is too precious to allow everyday people to interact with it as its makers intended: we can’t unfold it onto the floor, look at its symbols, and retell the story of the Mexica-Aztec migration.
To understand these interactive elements of codex’s materiality, I built a miniature copy of it. This copy (as close as I will get to a faithful translation) allowed me to understand the mechanics of the original. I could fold and unfold my copy, which led me to appreciate how the story is told both as a long narrative and as individual scenes highlighted on each folio. I could imagine hundreds of such folded books, each containing a different form of knowledge about the world, stored in the ancient libraries of Tenochtitlan–and the losses suffered when Spanish colonists burned them.
