Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2
Encyclopedia
Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (Cuauhtinchan Map #2, also known in the literature by the abbreviation MC2) is one of five indigenous maps from the sixteenth century Valley of Puebla
, that documents the history of the Chichimeca
Cucuhtinchantlacas. This map is a post-conquest document done in amate paper in a traditional cartographic history style very common in Mesoamerica
(Boone, 2000) and used to recount creation myths, migrations
, battles and allegiances, and to document lineages and territorial boundaries (Reyes, 1977).
and space
: From fourth century BC (400 BC) China
to nineteenth century Europe
, maps have been a medium that materialized or translated man's relationship to the world around it; as Harley
puts it “There are few aspects of human action and thought that have not been mapped at one time or another” (Harley, 1991). Maps
are a representation of place. As part of the Greek
legacy, cartography
stressed the “scientific”, methodical, and measurable aspects of these representations, which the European tradition embraced, dismissing the other more subjective discourses; and referring to these non-European maps as “primitive". (see History of Cartography
).
As cartography encompassed both the Western world
and non-Western world expressions its definition expanded from just being cognitive structures to understand space to be a contextual historical discourse.
Aztec
Post-conquest indigenous cartographic expressions were an example of the conscientious combination of the foreign and indigenous styles, an active reflection of the cultural changes taking place at that moment in Mesoamerica. The maps and the mapmaking that came from Europe to the New World
during the conquest were “framed by a scientific rationale, primarily accentuating economic, social, and political boundaries and often ignoring levels of signs and abstractions deeply rooted in the cultural context and social order where a map is produced” (Botero, 2006).
With this in mind Aztec maps were not just layouts of the empire, but actually cartographic histories. Not only those documented how things were arranged in space but they told stories and were a common method of presenting space and movement through it and Mexican historians made remarkable use of this technique (Boone, 2000). According to Elizabeth Hill Boone
any story is tied to a protagonist (who), a date (when), and a location (where); and maps such as the MC2 allowed the representation of these three elements, therefore they were a suitable discourse for their stories.
The map, using an undoubtedly Mesoamerican cartographic discourse, though with minor European accents (for example in the detail of the facial expressions), describes a pilgrimage. A ritual (Boone, 2000) and cultural journey from the mythical cave of Chicomoztoc
to the town of Cuauhtinchan in the heart of today’s Valley of Puebla in the immediacies of the Amozoc-Tepeaca mountain range (Yoneda, 2005). It tells a story that spans about four hundred years, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (Reyes, 1977). The story told in this manuscript starts while the Olmeca-Xicallanca were attacking the city of Cholula
, the Tolteca capital. The Tolteca rulers send two lords/priests, Icxicouatl (“Serpent Foot”) and Quetzalteueyac (“Feather Lip”) (Kirchhoff et al., 1976; Wake, 2007) to find and hire the famous Chichimeca mercenaries, “son valientes hombres, animosos y esforzados soldados (tiyacuah)” (Kirchhoff et al., 1976) that lived in Chicomoztoc to fight for them (Reyes, 1977).
The Chichimeca tribes left the sacred site led by Itzpapalotl, their goddess of war (Yoneda, 2002a), followed their Tolteca guides for thirteen days (Yoneda, 2002b), arrived to the city of Cholula, and defeated the Tolteca enemies, the Olmeca-Xicallanca. As reward for their services the Chichimeca-Cuauhtinchantlacas (the mapmakers’ ancestors) were given the title of teuchtli and allowed to settle in the immediacies of the mountain range of Amozoc-Tepeaca, where after surveying the valley they founded Cuauhtinchan (Reyes, 1977; Yoneda, 2005).
Additionally, the Map tells the story of the tensions between Cuauhtinchantlacas and Popollocas, their claims to the lands of the alteptl of Cuauhtinchan, and their ultimate defeat by the Mixteca Lord 13, who pursued and killed Teuchtlecozauhqui (Kirchhoff et al., 1976). After this the Cuauhtinchantlaca survivors took refuge in Matlazinco, south of Cuauhtinchan in the bank of the Atoyac River near the current town of San Juan of Tzictlacoya (Kirchhoff et al., 1976).
. The work was carried through the Moses Mesoamerican Archive in the Department of Anthropology and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
at Harvard University. The Mexican American historian of religions David Carrasco was responsible for organizing the five year study at Harvard that resulted in Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest, edited by Carrasco and his former student and colleague Scott Sessions. For a useful history of this project see the introduction to the book written by the co-editors. Carrasco will be on a lecture tour about the MC2 Codex in 2008 and 2009.
Puebla
Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....
, that documents the history of the Chichimeca
Chichimeca
Chichimeca was the name that the Nahua peoples of Mexico generically applied to a wide range of semi-nomadic peoples who inhabited the north of modern-day Mexico and southwestern United States, and carried the same sense as the European term "barbarian"...
Cucuhtinchantlacas. This map is a post-conquest document done in amate paper in a traditional cartographic history style very common in Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
(Boone, 2000) and used to recount creation myths, migrations
Human migration
Human migration is physical movement by humans from one area to another, sometimes over long distances or in large groups. Historically this movement was nomadic, often causing significant conflict with the indigenous population and their displacement or cultural assimilation. Only a few nomadic...
, battles and allegiances, and to document lineages and territorial boundaries (Reyes, 1977).
Mapping
Mapmaking is a cultural expression evidenced in different forms in any human community over timeTime
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
and space
Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
: From fourth century BC (400 BC) China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
to nineteenth century Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, maps have been a medium that materialized or translated man's relationship to the world around it; as Harley
John Brian Harley
Brian Harley was a geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Exeter and Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the founding co-editor of...
puts it “There are few aspects of human action and thought that have not been mapped at one time or another” (Harley, 1991). Maps
MAPS
Maps is the plural of map, a visual representation of an area.As an acronym, MAPS may refer to:* Mail Abuse Prevention System, an organisation that provides anti-spam support...
are a representation of place. As part of the Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
legacy, cartography
Cartography
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
stressed the “scientific”, methodical, and measurable aspects of these representations, which the European tradition embraced, dismissing the other more subjective discourses; and referring to these non-European maps as “primitive". (see History of Cartography
History of cartography
Cartography , or mapmaking, has been an integral part of the human story for a long time, possibly up to 8,000 years...
).
Ranging from paintings produced by the Aboriginal people of Australia (Indigenous AustraliansIndigenous AustraliansIndigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
) to maps of the Indigenous peoples of the AmericasIndigenous peoples of the AmericasThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
(Native Americans), and from the Marshall Islands stick chartMarshall Islands stick chartStick charts were made and used by the Marshallese to navigate the Pacific Ocean by canoe off the coast of the Marshall Islands. The charts represented major ocean swell patterns and the ways the islands disrupted those patterns, typically determined by sensing disruptions in ocean swells by...
s to the battle plans drawn on the ground by Māori warriors in New ZealandNew ZealandNew Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, they were widely regarded as an inchoate stage in the cognitive history of cartography. To the extent that they lacked orientation, regular scales, and the Euclidean geometryEuclidean geometryEuclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the Elements. Euclid's method consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and deducing many other propositions from these...
of modern maps, or were drawn on unfamiliar media, little effort was made to crack their codes of representation. They remained on the periphery of Western cartographic achievement. (Harley, 1991)
As cartography encompassed both the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
and non-Western world expressions its definition expanded from just being cognitive structures to understand space to be a contextual historical discourse.
AztecAztecThe Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...
Cartographic Histories
Post-conquest indigenous cartographic expressions were an example of the conscientious combination of the foreign and indigenous styles, an active reflection of the cultural changes taking place at that moment in Mesoamerica. The maps and the mapmaking that came from Europe to the New WorldNew World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
during the conquest were “framed by a scientific rationale, primarily accentuating economic, social, and political boundaries and often ignoring levels of signs and abstractions deeply rooted in the cultural context and social order where a map is produced” (Botero, 2006).
With this in mind Aztec maps were not just layouts of the empire, but actually cartographic histories. Not only those documented how things were arranged in space but they told stories and were a common method of presenting space and movement through it and Mexican historians made remarkable use of this technique (Boone, 2000). According to Elizabeth Hill Boone
Elizabeth Hill Boone
Elizabeth Hill Boone is an American art historian, ethnohistorian and academic, specialising in the study of Latin American art and in particular the early colonial and pre-Columbian art, iconography and pictoral codices associated with the Mixtec, Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures in the...
any story is tied to a protagonist (who), a date (when), and a location (where); and maps such as the MC2 allowed the representation of these three elements, therefore they were a suitable discourse for their stories.
The MC2 and the Tolteca-Chichimeca history
- Extracted from the MC2 and Paul KirchhoffPaul KirchhoffPaul Kirchhoff was a German-Mexican anthropologist, most noted for his seminal work in defining and elaborating the culture area of Mesoamerica, a term he coined....
's work
The map, using an undoubtedly Mesoamerican cartographic discourse, though with minor European accents (for example in the detail of the facial expressions), describes a pilgrimage. A ritual (Boone, 2000) and cultural journey from the mythical cave of Chicomoztoc
Chicomoztoc
Chicomoztoc is the name for the mythical origin place of the Aztec Mexicas, Tepanecs, Acolhuas, and other Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the central Mexico region of Mesoamerica, in the Postclassic period....
to the town of Cuauhtinchan in the heart of today’s Valley of Puebla in the immediacies of the Amozoc-Tepeaca mountain range (Yoneda, 2005). It tells a story that spans about four hundred years, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (Reyes, 1977). The story told in this manuscript starts while the Olmeca-Xicallanca were attacking the city of Cholula
Cholula (Mesoamerican site)
Cholula , was an important city of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, dating back to at least the 2nd century BCE, with settlement as a village going back at least some thousand years earlier. The great site of Cholula stands just west of the modern city of Puebla. Its immense pyramid exceeds the Pyramid...
, the Tolteca capital. The Tolteca rulers send two lords/priests, Icxicouatl (“Serpent Foot”) and Quetzalteueyac (“Feather Lip”) (Kirchhoff et al., 1976; Wake, 2007) to find and hire the famous Chichimeca mercenaries, “son valientes hombres, animosos y esforzados soldados (tiyacuah)” (Kirchhoff et al., 1976) that lived in Chicomoztoc to fight for them (Reyes, 1977).
The Chichimeca tribes left the sacred site led by Itzpapalotl, their goddess of war (Yoneda, 2002a), followed their Tolteca guides for thirteen days (Yoneda, 2002b), arrived to the city of Cholula, and defeated the Tolteca enemies, the Olmeca-Xicallanca. As reward for their services the Chichimeca-Cuauhtinchantlacas (the mapmakers’ ancestors) were given the title of teuchtli and allowed to settle in the immediacies of the mountain range of Amozoc-Tepeaca, where after surveying the valley they founded Cuauhtinchan (Reyes, 1977; Yoneda, 2005).
Additionally, the Map tells the story of the tensions between Cuauhtinchantlacas and Popollocas, their claims to the lands of the alteptl of Cuauhtinchan, and their ultimate defeat by the Mixteca Lord 13, who pursued and killed Teuchtlecozauhqui (Kirchhoff et al., 1976). After this the Cuauhtinchantlaca survivors took refuge in Matlazinco, south of Cuauhtinchan in the bank of the Atoyac River near the current town of San Juan of Tzictlacoya (Kirchhoff et al., 1976).
Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest
From 2002 to 2007 research on this manuscript was conducted at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. The work was carried through the Moses Mesoamerican Archive in the Department of Anthropology and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Founded in 1994, Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies works to increase knowledge of the cultures, economies, histories, environment, and contemporary affairs of past and present Latin America. The Center's main office is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard...
at Harvard University. The Mexican American historian of religions David Carrasco was responsible for organizing the five year study at Harvard that resulted in Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest, edited by Carrasco and his former student and colleague Scott Sessions. For a useful history of this project see the introduction to the book written by the co-editors. Carrasco will be on a lecture tour about the MC2 Codex in 2008 and 2009.
See also
Some interesting internal and external links to indigenous manuscripts and studies on these documents are:Further reading
- Traditional knowledge gisTraditional knowledge GISTraditional knowledge Geographic Information Systems are the data, techniques, and technologies designed to document and utilize local knowledges in communities around the world. Traditional knowledge is information that encompasses the experiences of a particular culture or society...
- Sinckan ManuscriptsSinckan ManuscriptsThe Sinckan Manuscripts refers to a series of leases, mortgages, and other commerce contracts written in the Sinckan language; they are commonly referred to as the "fanzi contracts." Some are written only in a romanized script, while others were bilingual with adjacent Han writing...
- Aztec CodicesAztec codicesAztec codices are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture....
- Maithili Karna Kayasthak Panjik SarvekshanMaithili Karna Kayasthak Panjik SarvekshanMaithil Karna Kayasthak Panjik Sarvekshan is a book written by Binod Bihari Verma in Maithili. It is a research study on the available ancient manuscripts in the Mithila region, called as Panjis, which are genealogical charts of Maithil Brahmin and Kayasthas castes...
- Ramírez CodexRamirez CodexThe Ramírez Codex is a post-conquest codex from the late 16th century entitled Relación del origen de los indios que hábitan esta Nueva España según sus Historias .Ascribed to Juan de Tovar, most scholars believe that he based this work on an...
- Nahuatl orthography