Mesoamerican maps

‘Maps have considerable antiquity in Mesoamerica. While very early cosmic maps are known, most of the terrestrial maps of regions in Mesoamerica date to the Late Postclassic and Early Colonial Periods.

’Cosmic Maps. Differing by culture, regions, and date, cosmic maps nonetheless share certain features, which reflect the similar cosmic template that was shared by many Mesoamerican peoples. The Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (1400-1500 CE), a ritual screenfold manuscript of unknown origin, opens with a horizontal view of the cosmos (main picture, above). It shows the four world trees set on the axes of the page, like the arms of a cross; these trees were widely believed to stand at the ends of the earth and hold up the skies. In contrast, the centre square is the domestic space of the household hearth, marked by a picture of the old fire god, whom the Nahua peoples knew as Xiuhtecuhtli. The entire cosmic schema is enclosed within a 260-day count (that takes the form of a Maltese cross). The Postclassic Maya present a similar cosmogram in the Codex Madrid of 1400-1500 CE (folios 75-76 - pic 1).

Pic 1: Folios 75-76, Codex Madrid, showing a cosmic Maya map

‘Throughout Mesoamerica, the cosmic order was a matter of interest, and cosmic maps and diagrams have been found in many media, although the oldest to survive are carved into stone. Many were public monuments, and the ruling elites often made use of cosmic maps to demonstrate their own place at its centre. The Maya ruler Pacal, for example, shows himself on his sarcophagus lid at the base of the world tree, an axis mundi (pic 3). Cosmic maps are the close cousins of the cosmic models that influenced both architecture and the arrangement of ceremonial centres.

’Terrestrial Maps. A wealth of surviving examples and eyewitness accounts reveals the rich traditions of terrestrial maps in the Postclassic period. The dominant genre was the community map, often called a lienzo (the Spanish word for ‘canvas’), because so many were painted or drawn on cloth panels, many the size of bedsheets.

Pic 3: The sarcophagus lid of Maya King Pacal of Palenque in his tomb

‘The highly centralised Aztec Empire, led by the Culhua-Mexica in the Valley of Mexico, fostered ever more specialised maps. To keep track of landholdings and land tenure, local ward leaders kept maps of their districts. As no pre-Hispanic examples exist, there are known from their Early Colonial-period counterparts, made when the Spanish took over the controls of the Aztec bureaucracy. The Plano en Papel de Maguey (c. 1540 CE) is a large-scale map of an intensely cultivated area in the Valley of Mexico, probably to the north of the Culhua-Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (pic 5). The map, made of fig-bark paper, shows a mosaic of house lots, with each marked by the name of its inhabitant; roads and canals lead off the map. Elsewhere, the same kind of information was kept by listing small maps of individual holdings in a land census.

Pic 5: Sheet 4 of the ‘Plano en Papel de Maguey’

‘Maps used for way-finding seem to have been a minor category of Mesoamerican maps. The Central Mexicans who best knew the routes for travel were the pochteca, the long-distance merchants. Whether they used maps on their treks from the highlands to the coast is not known, since no such maps survive, but they seem to have sketched maps of the cities they visited. Upon their return to the Valley of Mexico, they would turn these maps over to Aztec military commanders, who used them in planning surprise attacks of conquest. Otherwise, known city maps are highly emblematic, as is the rectangular map of Tenochtitlan of 1541, which opens the Codex Mendoza (pic 7).

Pic 7: City plan of Tenochtitlan; Codex Mendoza fol. 2