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Amate
Amate ( es, amate from nah, āmatl ) is a type of bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since the precontact times. It was used primarily to create codices. Amate paper was extensively produced and used for both communication, records, and ritual during the Triple Alliance; however, after the Spanish conquest, its production was mostly banned and replaced by European paper. Amate paper production never completely died, nor did the rituals associated with it. It remained strongest in the rugged, remote mountainous areas of northern Puebla and northern Veracruz states. Spiritual leaders in the small village of San Pablito, Puebla were described as producing paper with "magical" properties. Foreign academics began studying this ritual use of amate in the mid-20th century, and the Otomi people of the area began producing the paper commercially. Otomi craftspeople began selling it in cities such as Mexico City, where the paper was revived by Nahua painters in Guerrero to c ...
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San Pablito, Puebla
San Pablito is a small town located on the side of the Guajalote Mountain in the Sierra Norte de Puebla mountain region in central east Mexico. It belongs to the Pahuatlán municipality of the state of Puebla. Culturally it is dominated by the Otomi people, Otomi although it is part of the La Huasteca region. San Pablito is best known for the commercial production of a bark paper called amate as a Mexican handcrafts and folk art, handcraft. This paper is mostly sold to Nahua peoples, Nahua painters in Guerrero, but it is also sold nationally and internationally on its own. The paper is made much the way it was before the arrival of the Spanish. Originally, it was made only by the area's shamans for ritual purpose but today commercial production is mostly done by the town's women and children as many men have left to work in the United States. The town San Pablito is one of the towns belonging to the Pahuatlán municipality, located in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Sierra Norte regi ...
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Maya Codices
Maya codices (singular ''codex'') are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark paper. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of deities such as the Tonsured Maize God and the Howler Monkey Gods. Most of the codices were destroyed by conquistadors and Catholic priests in the 16th century. The codices have been named for the cities where they eventually settled. The Dresden codex is generally considered the most important of the few that survive. The Maya made paper from the inner bark of a certain wild fig tree, '' Ficus cotinifolia''. This sort of paper was generally known by the word ''huun'' in Mayan languages (the Aztec people far to the north used the word '' āmatl'' for paper). The Maya developed their ''huun''-paper around the 5th century, which is roughly the same time that the codex became predominant over the scroll in the Roman world. Maya paper was mo ...
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Papermaking
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for artistic expression. In papermaking, a dilute suspension consisting mostly of separate cellulose fibres in water is drained through a sieve-like screen, so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibres is laid down. Water is further removed from this sheet by pressing, sometimes aided by suction or vacuum, or heating. Once dry, a generally flat, uniform and strong sheet of paper is achieved. Before the invention and current widespread adoption of automated machinery, all paper was made by hand, formed or laid one sheet at a time by specialized laborers. Even today those who make paper by hand use tools and technologies quite similar to those existing hundreds of years ago, as originally developed in China and other ...
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Papyrus
Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, '' Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'') can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book. Papyrus is first known to have been used in Egypt (at least as far back as the First Dynasty), as the papyrus plant was once abundant across the Nile Delta. It was also used throughout the Mediterranean region. Apart from a writing material, ancient Egyptians employed papyrus in the construction of other artifacts, such as reed boats, mats, rope, sandals, and baskets. History Papyrus was first manufactured in Egypt as far back as the fourth millennium BCE.H. Idris Bell and T.C. Skeat, 1935"Papyrus and its uses"(British Museum pamphlet). The earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus was excavated in 2012 and 2 ...
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Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. Within this region pre-Columbian societies flourished for more than 3,000 years before the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Mesoamerica was the site of two of the most profound historical transformations in world history: primary urban generation, and the formation of New World cultures out of the long encounters among indigenous, European, African and Asian cultures. In the 16th century, Eurasian diseases such as smallpox and measles, which were endemic among the colonists but new to North America, caused the deaths of upwards of 90% of the indigenous people, resulting in great losses to their societies and cultures. Mesoamerica is one of the five areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently (see cradle of civ ...
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Grolier Codex
The ''Maya Codex of Mexico'' (MCM) is a Maya screenfold codex manuscript of a pre-Columbian type. Long known as the ''Grolier Codex'' or ''Sáenz Codex'', in 2018 it was officially renamed the ''Códice Maya de México'' (CMM) by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. It is one of only four known extant Maya codices, and the only one that still resides in the Americas. The MCM first appeared in a private collection in the 1960s and was shown at "The Maya Scribe and His World", an exhibition held at the Grolier Club in New York City in 1971, hence its former name. An almanac that charts the movements of the planet Venus, it originally consisted of twenty pages; the first eight and the last two are now missing. The greatest height of any of the surviving page fragments is 19 centimeters (7.5 in) of folio 8, and the average page width is 12.5 centimeters (4.9 in). The red frame lines at the bottom of pages four through eight indicates that the dimen ...
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San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán or San Lorenzo is the collective name for three related archaeological sites—San Lorenzo, Tenochtitlán and Potrero Nuevo—located in the southeast portion of the Mexican state of Veracruz. Along with La Venta and Tres Zapotes, it was one of the three major cities of the Olmec, and the major center of Olmec culture from 1200 BCE to 900 BCE. San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán is best known today for the colossal stone heads unearthed there, the greatest of which weigh or more and are high.Diehl, p. 41. The site should not be confused with Tenochtitlan, the Aztec site in Mexico City. Administrative names were translated into Aztec/Nahuatl and spread alongside Catholic names during the European conquest, replacing any original locality names, the knowledge of which has often been lost. Description The earliest evidence for Olmec culture is found at nearby El Manatí, a sacrificial bog with artifacts dating to 1600 BCE or earlier. Sedentary agriculturalists ha ...
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Olmec
The Olmecs () were the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization. Following a progressive development in Soconusco, they occupied the tropical lowlands of the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. It has been speculated that the Olmecs derived in part from the neighboring Mokaya or Mixe–Zoque cultures. The Olmecs flourished during Mesoamerica's formative period, dating roughly from as early as 1500 BCE to about 400 BCE. Pre-Olmec cultures had flourished since about 2500 BCE, but by 1600–1500 BCE, early Olmec culture had emerged, centered on the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán site near the coast in southeast Veracruz. They were the first Mesoamerican civilization, and laid many of the foundations for the civilizations that followed. Among other "firsts", the Olmec appeared to practice ritual bloodletting and played the Mesoamerican ballgame, hallmarks of nearly all subsequent Mesoamerican societies. The aspect of the Olmecs most familiar now ...
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Ficus Tecolutensis
''Ficus aurea'', commonly known as the Florida strangler fig (or simply strangler fig), golden fig, or ''higuerón'', is a tree in the family Moraceae that is native to the U.S. state of Florida, the northern and western Caribbean, southern Mexico and Central America south to Panama. The specific epithet ''aurea'' was applied by English botanist Thomas Nuttall who described the species in 1846. ''Ficus aurea'' is a strangler fig. In figs of this group, seed germination usually takes place in the canopy of a host tree with the seedling living as an epiphyte until its roots establish contact with the ground. After that, it enlarges and strangles its host, eventually becoming a free-standing tree in its own right. Individuals may reach in height. Like all figs, it has an obligate mutualism with fig wasps: figs are only pollinated by fig wasps, and fig wasps can only reproduce in fig flowers. The tree provides habitat, food and shelter for a host of tropical lifeforms including e ...
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Trema Micrantha
''Trema micrantha'', the Jamaican nettletree or capulin, is a plant species native to warmer parts of the Western Hemisphere. It has been reported from Mexico, Central America, tropical South America, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and southern Florida. Description ''Trema micrantha'' is a shrub or small tree up to 10 m tall. Leaves are egg-shaped, up to 9 cm long, green on top but covered with white, woolly pubescence underneath. Flowers are greenish-white. Fruits are yellow to bright reddish-range, up to 4 mm in diameter. Uses Following the recent local extirpation of slow-growing xalama in San Pablito, Mexico due to unsustainable harvesting driven by tourism, the Otomi people now use ''Trema micrantha'' bark strips as a raw material for making handmade amate Amate ( es, amate from nah, āmatl ) is a type of bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since the precontact times. It was used primarily to create codices. Amate p ...
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Magdalena Municipality, Jalisco
Magdalena is a town and municipality in the state of Jalisco in central-western Mexico. Magdalena lies 78 kilometers northwest of Guadalajara. The municipality covers an area of 445.36 km². It borders the state of Nayarit to the west, and the town of Tequila to the east. As of 2005, the municipality had a total population of 18,924. Geography The town is situated on rather high 1350 meters above sea level. It borders mountains to the north and somehow smaller hills to the south. In the west, there is a big water reservoir called the ''Laguna de Magdalena'', which features many different birds. Gems Magdalena is famous for fire opals; the whole region accommodates hundreds of mines where Obsidian Obsidian () is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extrusive rock, extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock. Obsidian is produced from felsic lava, rich in the lighter elements s ..., Fire opals, and other r ...
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