Accounting might seem a dull topic. The account books for just 14 years (1550–64) of a small Mixtec community, Santa Catalina Texupan, became the work of a lifetime for Kevin Terraciano. The 62-page codex, known as the Codex Sierra Texupan or, as Terraciano calls it at times, Codex Ñundaa (after the Mixtec name of the community), is remarkable in several ways that Terraciano skillfully explores. It has parallel pictographic, alphabetic, and numerical content and is in fact one of the longest and earliest alphabetic Nahuatl texts from Mexico, even though the community's primary and secondary languages were Mixtec (Ñudzahui) and Chocho (Ngiwa), respectively. A highlight of this volume is the exacting transcription and nuanced translation of the alphabetic Nahuatl text.
The codex's pictographic, alphabetic, and numerical content testify to colonial change and Indigenous resilience and creativity. Terraciano argues that the pictorial text was primary both because of its position—on the...
