This book is an original exploration into the history of material culture and consumption in Latin America over the past 500 years with special attention to the categories of food, clothing, shelter, and the arrangement of public and private space. The practice of consumption is related to supply and demand but also to the importance of ritual and the scramble for identity within the ethnic and class arrangements imposed by colonial and postcolonial societies.

In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican painted book that first came into public view at Sotheby s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlan and then focuses on the...

In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican painted book that first came into public view at Sotheby s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlan and then focuses on the...