Everyone recycles! Even pre-Columbian Mixtec. The Codex Selden, also known as the Codex Añute, dates from the mid-1500s and is a five-meter-long strip of deer hide covered in glyphs and human figures. It is one of fewer than 20 known Mexican codices to have survived from pre-colonial and early colonial Mexico. And it is the first known pre-Columbian palimpsest!
What’s that you ask? It means the deer hide once had a different document on it, which was scraped off, so the parchment could be reused for what we know today as the Codex Añute. Thankfully the scrapping was imperfect, allowing modern-day scientists to uncover the traces of imagery that remain. That’s all we know right now. Tests are currently being conducted to reconstruct what was written or drawn, and to try and figure out what it meant.
