Maps of the Encounter have been judged by the agenda of a positivist geographical history seeking to reconstruct the pathways, landing places, and settlements of European explorers and discoverers. They were studied largely for their practical use as tools of navigation, as aids to wayfinding on land, as plans for new colonial fortifications and towns, or as public propaganda images to attract new settlers to America. This paper argues that Native American mapping belongs in the cartographic record of the Encounter, and that European maps of the period can be viewed as statements of territorial appropriation, cultural reproduction, or as devices by which a Native American presence could be silenced. Recent studies in anthropology, art history, and ethnohistory identify a corpus of indigenous maps that represent valid “alternative’ cartographies, different from European maps, yet important in the history of spatial representation. In Mesoamerica, further decoding of cartographic elements in the pr...

Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter

The Archaeological Study of Empires and Imperialism in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico

Centuries before the creation of archaeology as a scientific discipline in the modern West, indigenous people in Mesoamerica developed their own interpretations for the physical remains of their past. This study draws on archaeological, ethnographic, and historical sources to explore a tradition of indigenous Mesoamerican archaeology. By resorting to the culturearea concept of Mesoamerica, an interpretive structure of the long term is outlined. This framework is used to explore the social life of objects and places from the past in three paired locations: the Classic site of Teotihuacan and the 16thcentury Mexica Aztec capital of Tenochtitln; the Classic site of Yucuudahui and the 16thcentury Mixtec community of Chachoapan; and the Postclassic site of Chichen Itza and the 20thcentury Yucatec Maya community of Chan Kom. Shifting between wide and narrow perspectives in time and space, this study considers archaeology as a social practice, inventions and revisions of tradition, and the productivity of region...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339526

The Social Life of Pre‐Sunrise Things

1. Preliminaries 2. Situating Teotihuacan 3. Urbanism begins in central Mexico: 500-100 BCE 4. Teotihuacan takes off: 100-1 BCE 5. Teotihuacan supremacy in the basin of Mexico: 1-100 CE 6. Great pyramids and early grandeur: 100-250 CE 7. Teotihuacan at its height: 250-550 CE 8. Teotihuacan ideation and religion: imagery, meanings, and uses 9. 'Interesting times': Teotihuacan comes apart and a new story begins: after 550 CE 10. Teotihuacan in a wider perspective.

Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in Central Mexico

The acquisition and use of exotic, valuable, and ritually important elite goods is a prominent feature of many imperial political economies. After an extensive review of the archaeological and documentary sources on one specific valuable in the empire of Chimor, this paper analyzes the visual representation of such goods, an aspect seldom addressed by archaeologists. An architectural relief recently excavated at Chan Chan, the capital of Chimor, sheds new light on the use of exotic materials and long-distance trade and exchange along the Pacific coast of South America in the late Prehispanic period. This relief, named "Los Buceadores " (The Divers) for the principal imagery depicting Spondylus divers, is important for elucidating the role of this valuable in the early development of the Chimu' empire. It is argued that the Chimu' rulers sponsored a long-distance exchange network during an early stage of the expansion of the Chimu' polity and that the fruits of this network, particularly Spondylus, formed a critical element in the formation and maintenance of the ritual and economic basis of power for the expanding state. Uno rasgo importante de muchas economfas politicas imperiales es la adquisicio'n y uso de bienes exoticos de gran valor e importancia ritual para las e'lites. Despue's de resenar los datos arqueologicos y las fuentes documentales que hay sobre uno de estos bienes en el imperio de Chimor, este trabajo analiza su representacion visual, un procedimiento poco abordado por los arqueologos. Un relieve arquitectonico en barro recientemente descubierto en Chan Chan, la capital Chimu', provee nuevas perspectivas sobre el uso de bienes exoticos y sobre el comercio e intercambio a larga distancia durante el periodo Prehispa'nico tardio en el litoral Paeffico de Sudame'rica. El relieve, llamado "Los Buceadores" por el tema principal que representa buscadores de Spondylus, es de gran relevancia para dilucidar el papel que esta concha desempeno en el desarrollo temprano del imperio de Chimor. Se propone aquf que los gobernantes Chimu' financiaban una red de intercambio a la rga distancia du rante un estadfo temprano de la expansion del imperio, y que los beneficios de esa red comercial, y pa rticularmente de la concha Spondylus, constituyeron un elemento de suma importancia en la formacion y mantenimiento de las bases economicas y rituales del poder sobre el que se sustentaba la expansion del estado.

Arthur G. Miller

Papers

The Mural Painting of Teotihuacan