{
  "id": "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Antonio de León y Gama, Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras (Mexico, 1792)",
  "summary": "The book a criollo astronomer of Mexico City wrote about two Mexica monuments dug out of the main square in 1790, arguing from Nahuatl manuscripts and codices in his own hands that their makers had geometry, mechanics and a corrected luni-solar calendar. It records the viceregal order that preserved one stone, the informal handover of the other, and the reason its censor wanted the argument made.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "new-spain",
    "mexico",
    "science",
    "astronomy",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "books",
    "ethnography",
    "enlightenment",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-seminario-de-mineria"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "carlos-de-siguenza-y-gongora"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "del-rio-palenque-report-1787"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "academia-de-san-carlos-de-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "joaquin-velazquez-de-leon"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "observatorio-astronomico-de-santafe-de-bogota"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "garcia-de-palacio-relacion-de-1576"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "marquez-due-antichi-monumenti-1804"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is León y Gama's Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras?",
    "When were the Aztec Sun Stone and the Coatlicue statue found?",
    "Did Spanish authorities in Mexico try to preserve Aztec monuments?",
    "Who first argued that the Mexica had a scientific calendar?",
    "What was the dispute of the New World about American peoples?",
    "Was the Aztec calendar a scientific system or superstition?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page of the printing read here states the subject and the imprint: \"DESCRIPCION HISTÓRICA Y CRONOLÓGICA DE LAS DOS PIEDRAS QUE CON OCASION DEL NUEVO EMPEDRADO QUE SE ESTÁ FORMANDO EN LA PLAZA PRINCIPAL DE MÉXICO, SE HALLARON EN ELLA EL AÑO DE 1790\", promising to explain the system of the calendars of the Indians, their method of dividing time and the correction they made to bring their civil year into agreement with the tropical solar year, with further matter on Mexican mythology and astronomy. It is \"POR DON ANTONIO DE LEON Y GAMA\", printed \"MÉXICO. EN LA IMPRENTA DE DON FELIPE DE ZÚÑIGA Y ONTIVEROS. AÑO DE M. DCC. XCII.\"",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The book fixes the finds by date and by measured position, from the judicial record. On 13 August 1790, while excavating to form the masonry conduit for the water, a stone statue was found immediately beside the drainage channels called Señor San Joseph, five varas north of the ditch and thirty-seven west of the Real Palacio, its head at a depth of a vara and a third and its foot rather less than a vara down. It was suspended and set upright at midnight on 4 September by means of a real tackle and double pulley, drawn out at the same hour on the 25th, and afterwards conveyed to the Real Universidad. The second stone was uncovered on 17 December of the same year at only half a vara of depth, eighty varas west of the second door of the Real Palacio and thirty-seven north of the Portal de las Flores. The author notes that the day of the first find was the anniversary of the taking of the city in 1521, and that two witnesses gave the date equivocally as the 14th.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The book prints the viceregal correspondence that saved the first stone, and the order is an antiquities-preservation instrument in everything but name. Replying on 6 September 1790 to a proposal of the previous day, the viceroy writes: \"Convengo gustoso en que se conduzca á la Real y Pontificia Universidad la figura de piedra hallada en las excavaciones de la Plaza de este Palacio, y se coloque en el parage de aquel Edificio que se contemple el mas apropósito; cuidando V. S. como me propone, de hacerla medir, pesar, dibujar y grabar, á fin de publicarla, con las noticias que aquel Ilustre Cuerpo tenga ó pueda indagar acerca de su origen.\" The statue was in fact moved to the university and placed in one of the corners of its atrium. The author then records that the measuring, weighing, drawing and engraving promised by the intendant had not to that date been carried out.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The second stone was handled with markedly less care, and the book says so. It was asked for by two commissioners of the fabric of the metropolitan cathedral, Doctor Joseph Uribe, canon penitentiary, and Doctor Juan Joseph Gamboa; and although no record appears of that petition having been formalised by note or in any other juridical manner, nor any decree of donation, it was handed over by verbal order. A monument the author calls the most particular and instructive of the two changed hands on nobody's signature.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The scientific claim is stated as an inference from the object, item by item. In the second stone, the author writes, various parts of the mathematical sciences are manifest, which they knew to perfection; its bulk and weight give proof of mechanics and machinery, without whose fundamental principles it could not have been cut and carried from the place of its origin to the one where it was placed; by the perfection with which the circles are formed, by the parallelism the circles keep between them, by the exact division of their parts, by the direction of the straight lines to the centre and by other circumstances not common to those ignorant of geometry, \"se conocen las claras luces que de esta ciencia tuvieron los Mexicanos\". From astronomy and chronology, the uses they made of this stone show how familiar to them were observations of the sun and the stars, and the distribution of time into periods bearing an analogy to the movements of the moon, which served them to arrange their feasts on fixed days, days that could not vary by more than thirteen from the time set by their rites across the extended interval of fifty-two years, at the end of which they reformed their civil year.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "His method rests on indigenous documents held and read, not on European report. He had long before made his combinations, he writes, from manuscripts of the Indians themselves in their Mexican language as much as from the relations of \"nuestros Españoles\", together with the paintings he has in his own possession and cites in that work; and going over on the stone itself, day after day, the particulars that are found so confused, dispersed and truncated in the writings of the Indians themselves, and in no way touched by the Spanish authors, he was able to understand what most of the figures engraved on the second stone signified. He also states the limit: some of its figures remain, whose hieroglyphs wrap up many allegorical significations, which he has not interpreted entirely.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Indigenous scholarship enters the book as authority rather than as raw material. The names and order of the nine Companions of the calendar, he writes, are those given by \"D. Christoval del Castillo, Indio que escribió la erudita historia en lengua mexicana de la venida de los de esta nacion, y de la Conquista hecha por los Españoles\", and a long footnote argues the point of who Castillo was: Clavijero calls him a mestizo, which is the name given to the son of a Spaniard and of an Indian woman, but neither one nor the other is true, for he was a noble Indian, a native of Texcoco, who wrote in Mexican very elegantly and politely the history of the coming of those of this nation to people the lands of Anahuac, the persecutions suffered by king Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco, the entry of the Spaniards into these lands, and the events of the Conquest. The author corrects two celebrated Spanish-American scholars in defence of the standing of an indigenous historian.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "He also names, without polemic, who lost the evidence. The variety with which the Spanish historians speak about the size and material of the statues the Indians made of their gods, and the preoccupation into which the first religious who preached the Gospel fell — that whatever they saw carved on stones or figured on cloths or paper was an object of idolatry — caused the confusion in which all of them were found, without anybody knowing how to discern which figures belonged purely to the cult of their gods and which referred to their histories. On his account these were regularly carved on great slabs, on the doorways of the palaces of lords the deeds of their ancestors were figured, and there was no city or town that did not have the year of its foundation and the origin of its name engraved on the stones of its walls or on the crags of its hills.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "From that loss he draws a programme, and it is the reason the book belongs in any history of American archaeology. He asks how many historical monuments would not be found in the antiquity of the Indies if excavations were made on purpose, as they have been made in Italy to find statues and fragments recalling the memory of ancient Rome, and as they are being made at that moment in Spain, in the village of Rielves, three leagues from Toledo, where several ancient pavements have been uncovered. He puts the buried past of Mexico on the same footing as the buried past of Rome, and asks for the same spade.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The motive is printed in the book's own front matter and is not what a modern reader expects. The parecer of Fray Joseph Rafael Olmedo, professor of the subtle doctor Scotus in the Real Universidad de México, recommends the work because its two writings will undeceive many and will dispel \"las tercas y ciegas preocupaciones con que por un prurito de obscurecer las gloriosas Conquistas de la España, han llegado á colocar á la nacion Indiana en la clase muy inmediata á la de las fieras y brutos mas estúpidos el Abate Raynal, el Dr. Robertson, Mons. Buffon, Paw y otros de los Filósofos ilustrados.\" Defending the civilisation of the Mexica and defending the record of the Spanish conquest are, in the censor's sentence, the same act. The author's competence is praised in the same paragraph, including his command of \"el idioma Mexicano en toda su pureza\".",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What the book is bounds what it proves, and the author supplies the caution himself. On first seeing the second stone he was filled with pleasure, he writes, at having found in it a faithful testimony that confirmed what at the cost of so much labour and study he had already written about the system of the Mexican calendars, against the false hypotheses with which the writers of Indian history had disfigured and confounded them. The monument is thus read by a man who had a prior system to vindicate, in a book whose licence praises it for answering European detractors of Spain. Its readings of the calendar are an argument of 1792 and are not treated here as settled; what the pages establish is that a criollo astronomer in Mexico City made the case for Mexica mathematics and astronomy from indigenous manuscripts and from the stones themselves, in print, with official approval.",
      "sources": [
        "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The Sun Stone and the Coatlicue are among the most reproduced objects in the world, and the book that first described them is normally reduced to a citation in the caption. Read from the sheets, it turns out to hold the documentary record of the finds — the depth, the bearings from the door of the viceregal palace, the midnight lift on 4 September 1790, the viceroy's written order that the statue be taken to the university and be measured, weighed, drawn and engraved for publication, and the admission that the drawing was never done. It also holds what English-language accounts of the \"dispute of the New World\" rarely quote: a criollo astronomer arguing Mexica geometry and mechanics from the object itself, correcting Clavijero in defence of the standing of an indigenous historian of Texcoco, blaming the first missionaries by name for the indiscriminate destruction that made the evidence unreadable, and asking for excavation in Mexico on the model of Rome. The costs and the motives travel with the achievement: the second stone was handed to the cathedral on a verbal order with no deed, the censor's licence frames the whole book as a reply to Raynal, Robertson, Buffon and De Pauw in defence of Spain's conquests, and the author says himself that the stone confirmed a system he had already written.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
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    "name": "Antonio de León y Gama, Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras (Mexico, 1792)",
    "description": "The book a criollo astronomer of Mexico City wrote about two Mexica monuments dug out of the main square in 1790, arguing from Nahuatl manuscripts and codices in his own hands that their makers had geometry, mechanics and a corrected luni-solar calendar. It records the viceregal order that preserved one stone, the informal handover of the other, and the reason its censor wanted the argument made.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
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        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Descripcion historica y cronologica de las dos piedras que con ocasion del nuevo empedrado que se está formando en la plaza principal de México, se hallaron en ella el año de 1790",
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Antonio de León y Gama, Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras (Mexico, 1792)"
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}