The First Written Record of Earthquakes in the Americas?

In seeking evidence of prehistoric earthquakes (“prehistoric,” that is, within the sense of Eurasia and its written history), seismologists and other earth scientists most often look to the rock record. They dig deep, making trenches and taking core samples to indicate shifts along fault lines and evidence of earth movements and associated tsunamis along coastlines. But if they look hard enough, they may find that other validated records exist.

Earth and social scientists Gerardo Suárez (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and Virginia GarcíaAcosta (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology) have discovered evidence of “prehistoric” earthquakes within a written, historic record from Mexico and Central America that is over 500 years old. Reporting in the online journal Seismological Research Letters, they note how a 50-page “codex” from a pre-Hispanic civilization in the Americas describes no less than 12 major earthquakes between 1460 and 1542.

The Aztec manuscript is known as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Some of the events it records via pictograms are now assumed by Suárez and Barcia-Acosta to be earthquakes, and the later recorded earthquakes correlate to reports from Spanish friars who arrived in the New World on the heels of Christopher Columbus after 1492. Taken in whole, per Suárez and García-Acosta, this is “the first written evidence of earthquakes in the Americas.”