PAPER.
Extent of very interesting topic in the Archeology of this region is the manufacture of gaper and the uses to which it was applied. Nowhere else on the continent was this industry developed. In Mexico paper was produced in large quantities. According to the tribute rolls of the ancient Mexican government, the different provinces were required to send to the capital thousand reams or bundles (resmas) of paper every year for official use. Several cities have their names compounded with the Nahuatl word for paper, amail, as though their principal business was connected with this staple.
Nor was the knowledge of it confined to Mexico. The Nahuatl col onies in Soconusco, Guatemala, and Nicaragua carried with them the methods of preparing this valuable product; not only did the Mayas of Yucatan make free use of it, but their distant relatives the Quiches and Cakchiquels in Guatemala and the Tzendals in Chiapas were familiar with it. Probably also it was not unknown to the Tarascas and Zapotecs, the former residents of the province of Michoacan, the latter on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Method of method of paper manufacture was probably everywhere the same, although the obscure descriptions of the early Spanish explorers might lead us to suppose otherwise. The fibrous material employed was obtained from the leaves of the magney-plant (Agave Americana). They were macerated and heckled like flax, and then pounded together, the fibres uniting by a process akin to felting. A sur face was given to the fibrous sheets and greater coherence obtained by painting them with a solution of vegetable gum, which was rubbed smooth and white by polishing with a mineral substance. The sheets were from ten to twelve feet in length and from eight to ten inches wide. They were not rolled, but folded in a zigzag manner like a screen.
Each of the folds of the paper thus prepared for the market offered a page on which was painted whatever the scribe or, more properly, the artist wished to record. The plan of the Aztec and Maya writing has been discussed in Volume I. (pp. 93, 229), so we may confine ourselves here to its Objective considerable number of specimens of maguey paper—which was in common use for a generation after the Conquest— have been preserved. The fibres are coarse, the texture is loose, and the color grayish. These peculiarities are in a measure due to the age of the specimens. The colors were evidently laid on with a brush, and often with a firm hand, denoting long practice. The hues have generally been well retained after several centuries of exposure. An Aztec or Maya book, with its leaves painted on both sides with strange characters in vivid colors, must when new have presented a striking appearance.
Purposes for ahich Paper was was used by these nations for many other purposes than bookmaking. The old writers inform us that on many occasions of ceremony, festivals, dramas, etc. it was em ployed for dressing and ornamenting the temples, idols, victims, priests, and performers. The nobles wore rosettes of paper on their foreheads, and parts of the clothing of all classes were of the same inexpensive material. The extraordinary and ample head-dresses which so frequently occur on the images in stone and pottery, and on the figures portrayed in the manuscripts, were probably of paper. As this substance could readily be cut into any desired form and painted with brilliant colors, nothing was better adapted for constructing cheap and effective decoration. (See Vol. I. p. 229, pl. 42.)