Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España and pre-Conquest signs

Record summary

Diego Durán’s chronicle recounts Mexica history, religious traditions, portents, and the Spanish conquest, including narratives of unusual signs preceding political upheaval. These passages are relevant to comparison because later UFO writers sometimes recast pre-Conquest “celestial signs” as technological visitations. Durán instead presents them within Indigenous historical and religious frameworks filtered through a Dominican author. The text’s informants, translation practices, and dependence on earlier pictorial or oral materials require careful study before treating any episode as an observation report.