Copies as Mediation Devices

We often investigate written artefacts through their digital reproductions, which can be understood in the context of a long history of copying techniques, from engraving to photography. Therefore, to question what are the implications of the reproductions of written artefacts in research is a necessary and fruitful endeavour. The objective of this project is to investigate the entanglements of reproductions of pictographic manuscripts from Mesoamerica in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the forms of drawings, watercolours, paintings, lithographs, photographic reproductions, and facsimiles and how they mediated knowledge production through copying practices and editorial choices.

The late nineteenth century was a crucial period during which the methods and practices of disciplines such as archaeology, ethnology, and anthropology were developed. Concomitantly, the field that became known as Americanism, that is, the study of Amerindian societies through the lens of natural history, emerged as the dominant approach to understanding the past and present of the Americas. Americanism established its international scientific scene, including collaborations and disputes that, in many instances, included the production, circulation, and archiving of reproductions of written artefacts.

The project RFE19 aims to investigate how copying practices in discrepant contexts in Europe, the United States, and Mexico affected the production of knowledge about the codices and articulated research on the Mesoamerican past. It is a cross-disciplinary project that examines these reproductions from the perspectives of manuscript studies, art history, and the history of science. The main source materials are:

1. handmade reproductions commissioned by scholars, such as watercolours or paintings, which could reproduce, but not always, the materiality of the original written artefacts;
2. printed facsimiles using lithography or photographic reproduction techniques;
3. line drawings and schemes of pictographs made for scientific publications.

Part of the project's results were presented in Summer 2024, in Lyon, at the Conference of the CIHA - Comité International d'Histoire de l’Art, one of the most important in the discipline. Another highlight of the research activities has been a research trip to Mexico City and Oaxaca in 2024 to investigate reproductions at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología, and the Archivo Nacional, among others. Many of these copies of written artefacts,  which tell so much about the history of the disciplines that studied Mesoamerica, have not been studied or published before; hence the necessity of bringing them to the spotlight.

Within the Cluster Understanding Written Artefacts, there is a contribution to the volume on essays with the theme “Archival temporalities materialised”, which has been organised at the Research Field E (“Archiving Artefacts”), still in preparation. Also in the Cluster, within the scope of this project, the PI organised a monthly reading group on provenance research and written artefacts, in which were discussed practices, methods, and concerns about how written artefacts are understood by different disciplines, and about ethics, power relationships, colonial questions, reproduction, access, exhibition, and reparative scholarship in the study of written artefacts.

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Project lead: Vivian Berto de Castro