When the Indians saw the reckless torment that their writings were subjected to, and the efficacy and activity with which the ministers who weren't very well informed sought these paintings to burn them, they tried to hide some of them, especially those that contained distributions of lands, that served as titles of their possessions, and those they found of taxes, and they were like lists of the taxpayers of the provinces and towns, and for this reason most of those that were found that have survived to our days are of this type. They were so diligent in hiding them that many were not content to enclose them in coffers and larders, but they buried them under the ground and in the hollows of the walls, leaving to their descendants, with great secrecy, the information of the place where they were, and in this way the Gentleman Boturini found many of those that he gathered, and he assured me that he had taken a box of them from the concealed hollow of a thick old wall in the town of Humuantla which he found out about from one of the descendants of the one who hid them there;...
https://ia801903.us.archive.org/8/items/jstor-1766897/1766897.pdf
IN the year 1736, an Italian of long lineage but light purse landed at Vera Cruz His name was Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, and the business which took him to Mexico was the collection of the arrears of a pension due some of the descendants of Montezuma who then resided in Portugal.
To these aims he gave up nine consecutive years, and all the money that he could borrow or beg; for his own supply of that useful article was uncomfortably limited. But a foreigner, a begging foreigner, and that foreigner an archaeologist, was a combination too repugnant to the Spanish constitution to be stomached long; so, in 1745, the vice-regal government seized Boturini, threw him into prison, and sequestrated his collections of books and manuscripts, so precious in his eyes, as he pathetically wrote. "That I would not exchange them for gold, nor silver, nor diamonds, nor pearls." How the true spirit of the collector breathes in those lines ! But, alas! he was destined never to see them again. Removed from prison, he was sent to Spain for trial, where he died in 1749. His priceless collection was presented by the viceroy to the University of Mexico, whence it was scattered to different private and public owners.