The Maya Codex of Mexico: The Oldest Book in the Americas Almost Lost to Skepticism

Episode Summary

In 1965, Mexican antiquities collector Dr. Josué Sáenz was blindfolded on a light plane with the compass covered, flown to a remote dirt airstrip near Tortuguero in Chiapas, and presented with a wooden box pulled from a dry cave containing a painted, screen-folded book — what would turn out to be the oldest surviving codex from Mexico and the oldest book in the Americas, dating between 1021 and 1154 CE. But that Indiana Jones origin story was precisely why the academic world rejected it for half a century. The towering English Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson publicly dismissed it as a forgery in 1975 without ever seeing it in person, and his verdict became law — the codex was seized under the U.S.-Mexico Artifacts Treaty,  ...