Hunt for the Codex Cardona (updated to include correct URL: hat tip to DUer guyton)

A retired UC Davis history professor turns detective, attempts to solve mystery of a missing Mexican treasure.

Source: newsreview.com
By Kel Munger

Meet the real-life version of Robert Langdon, the professorial mystery-solving hero of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novels such as The Da Vinci Code.

He’s a retired professor of Latin American history at UC Davis, a white-haired, scholarly gent who grows a couple of varieties of grapes in his personal vineyard in rural Yolo County. No one has ever threatened his life or attempted to murder him, and he’s never been pursued through the narrow streets of an ancient city by thuggish fanatics bent on stopping his pursuit of knowledge. But he’s been on the case of the Codex Cardona, a manuscript that contains information about Mexico in the period before and immediately after the European invasion, for the last 25 years.

“It’s a treasure,” Arnold Bauer said of the Codex Cardona. “And it’s a mystery.”

Bauer has written a book, recently published by Duke University Press, about his attempt to solve that mystery. The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure, revolves around his efforts to learn where the codex came from and who currently has it.

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1376596
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This is a substantial article, and well worth the read.

:)

:blush:

They had huge bonfires, led by Catholic priests, and torched thousand upon thousands of indigeous books.

In my mind, the invasion and the destruction of the culture was right up there with the burning of the library at Alexandria.

Why are there so many small minds, and so much hate and fear ?

Who knows what treasures went up in flames because the Conquistadors and their so-called 'holy' priests were afraid of new information and had to demonize the people and their traditions as they stole land and gold from them?

this codex was part of an effort by those more interested in indigenous culture, to reclaim knowledge being lost through the destruction of which you (and the article) refer.

That was the case not just in Mexico and Central America, but also with indigenous texts in North and South America. The "illiterate peoples" bullshit somehow -- in some twisted minds -- makes it possible to justify the wholesale human, cultural, and environmental travesties of the fear-driven, greed-impelled invaders.

'cause I think this has the makings of a pretty fascinating story yet to come.