Restoring the Visual Record of Mesoamerican and Spanish Colonial Cultures
Hidden Artifacts, Rare Books, and Photography Collections at Cal State LA and the USC Libraries
In 2021, Cal State LA and USC were awarded a nearly $500,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to catalog and digitize Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial materials. Use the links below to explore our newly created digital collections of Mesoamerican, Indigenous, and Spanish colonial artifacts; rare books; and photographs of important archaeological sites. These valuable and rarely seen materials highlight the rich histories and diverse cultural heritage of Mexico and the Central American Isthmus, and the profound contributions to art, science, architecture, and language by the Maya, Toltec, Aztecs, and Shaft Tomb cultures, among other Indigenous peoples.
California State University, Los Angeles
The 360 Mesoamerican cultural artifacts from The MAW Collection represent various regions and include vases, ceremonial figures, cups, amulets, bottles, necklaces, bowls, pipes, and pendants in ceramic, stone, and metal. The cultures represented are from the Tlatilco, Las Bocas, Chupicuaro, Mexcala, Olmec, Mixtec, Shaft Tomb, Tlapacoya, Zapotec, Maya and Teotihuacan.
Henry B. Nicholson dominated the field of Aztec studies for over four decades leaving behind a vast amount of scholarship. An avid photographer, this collection contains photographic slides documenting his work at numerous Mesoamerican archaeological sites from the early 1950s to 2000.
Our project ensured the physical preservation and limited handling of 59 rare books totaling 10,606 pages from the Cal State LA Mesoamerican and Colonial Mexico Rare Book Collection. Normally stored in closed stacks for preservation with limited public access, providing them digitally makes them readily available.
View the 360 artifacts from the MAW Collection as interactive 3D objects that can be rotated, turned, flipped, and viewed from many different angles. Using photogrammetry techniques, our project team used a series of still photos of each artifact to create the interactive 3D objects.
The University of Southern California Digital Library
The Verle and Elizabeth Annis Papers feature photographs from important archaeological sites and Spanish colonial architecture throughout Mexico and Central America during the 1930s-50s.
The Payne B. Johnson Latin American Photographs include images captured by Johnson during his travels to Mesoamerican sites between the 1970s and 2000s. He retraced the journeys by early explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood who in the 1840s first documented Chichen Itza, Copan, Labna, and other Maya sites.
As part of the project, we digitized a number of Rare Books and Manuscripts on Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial history by Thomas Gage, Bernardino de Sahagún, Henri de Saussure, and other authors from the USC Libraries’ collections. These rare volumes include original illustrations and graphics and date as far back as 1696.
The images in the gallery below are a small sample of the diverse and fascinating materials included in our collaborative project on Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial cultures.
