in New York, hence its name The first Mexican owner, Josué Saenz, claimed that the manuscript had been recovered from a cave in the Mexican state of
Chiapas in the 1960s, along with a mosaic mask, a wooden box, a knife handle, as well as a child's sandal and a piece of rope, along with some blank pages of
amate (pre-Columbian fig-bark paper). Saenz lent the manuscript to the Grolier Club and later presented the book to the Mexican nation. The codex is said to have been found enclosed in a wooden box in a dry cave in the highlands of
Chiapas near
Tortuguero; it was said to have been found with a turquoise mask that is now in the collection of
Dumbarton Oaks. In 1965, the Mexican collector Dr. Josué Sáenz was taken by two men on a light plane to a remote airstrip in the foothills of the
Sierra Madre near Tortuguero in
Tabasco state; the compass of the plane was covered with a cloth but Sáenz recognized his approximate location. At the airstrip he was shown the codex along with some other looted Maya artifacts and was told that he could take the items back to Mexico City for authentication before purchasing them. The antiquities expert that Sáenz consulted declared that the artifacts were fakes but Sáenz later purchased the codex and permitted Michael Coe to display the codex at the Grolier Club in 1971. Sáenz donated the codex to the Mexican government and it is currently kept in the vault of the
National Library, The claimed discovery of the
Grolier Codex would make it the only pre-Columbian codex discovered in the course of the 20th century, except for some codex fragments excavated by archaeologists. Following the 1971 exhibition,
Michael D. Coe, published the first half-size recto-side facsimile of the codex in
The Maya Scribe and His World, published by the Grolier Club in 1973. The MCM was subsequently published various times, by detractors (
J. Eric S. Thompson, Milbrath, Baudez, among them) and by proponents (Stuart, Carlson). Coe,
Stephen D. Houston,
Mary Miller, and
Karl Taube published the first full-sized facsimile in 2015, using photographs taken by
National Geographic photographer Enrico Ferorrelli in 1987, along with a full set of hand-drawn and uncopyrighted drawings for dissemination, and a thorough analysis of the context, content, and iconography of the codex. a subsequent test in 2012 produced a date of 1050–1284. Tests under the sponsorship of INAH yielded additional radiocarbon dates, leading to a consensus that the manuscript dates to the 11th or 12th century. Additional scientific study has demonstrated that the
amate paper surface was prepared on both sides with a thin foundation of
gypsum, or
calcium sulfate (CaSO4•2H2O) measuring between 0.2 mm-0.3 mm, in order to form a smooth writing surface. The Mexican studies have also proven that the pigment is contemporaneous with the paper; further work has shown that the pigments include
lamp black, red produced from
hematite (Fe2O3),
Maya blue fashioned from indigo dye and
palygorskite, and browns prepared with
cochineal. Mexican scientific study has also shown that the codex was subjected to at least three periods of high moisture conditions. Furthermore, tiny arthropods took up residence in the MCM at some point, yielding crisply chewed edges that detractors of the manuscript misconstrued as scissor cuts. teams of scientists under the auspices of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History were preparing the studies that would declare the MCM to be authentic in 2018. == Content ==