Merging myth and material metaphor in maps

Teotihuacan has never been no longer. A once thriving metropolis of perhaps 150,000 people, its cataclysmic end (below) never expunged the associations which had been, would be, and continue to be formed between people and this material cosmopolis. Its sheer matter foregoes oblivion. One facet of this continuing legacy is how the massive monuments would continue to be transformed into media for various purposes. Mapping is a medium particularly suited to making mobile such immobile places in order that something of their ‘weightiness’ can be conveyed to others (Latour 1986). A witnessing through visualization.

Several early post-Conquest historical sources mention Teotihuacan in terms of indigenous myth and historical events. The Spanish, in their retreat from Tenochtítlan, the Aztec capital, passed by the great monuments. A potent passing considering the Aztec civilization, toppled by the conquistadores, believed that the current world which they had risen to dominate and now was, as they knew it, ending, had begun at the venerated ruins (Boone 2000, Miller 1993). Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar and arguably the ‘father of Mesoamerican ethnography’, had compiled extensive accounts of the conquered populations of Mexico in the century after the Conquest. The myths recounted by his native informants, such as the one opening this chapter, speak of the gathering of the Aztec gods at Teotihuacan to sacrifice themselves in order to create existence (the ‘Fifth World’ for the Aztecs). Both imaginary and material, Teotihuacan was a potent metaphor for Aztec culture (Boone 2000 gives a detailed treatment).

The Aztecs very likely created plans of the spatial relationship of Teotihuacan’s monuments and distinctive layout, for they modeled the core of their own capital after the template of Teotihuacan (Matos Moctezuma 2003:29). Yet aside from the architectural similarities, no elaborate Aztec visualizations have been recovered. Teotihuacan has arguably been identified in ‘place signs’ from the Codex Xolotl, indicating that the ancient city was part of the Aztec’s administrative system (Boone 2000:383-5). So despite being in ‘ruins’, more than 800 years after its apogee, the city held some measure of practical importance as well – an independent altepetl, or a polity of the region which supplied tribute to the governing city-state of Texcoco. Aside from these textual accounts, though, Teotihuacan first appears on a ‘map’ in 1560 – more than 40 years after the Spanish passed by the Aztec’s material source of myth.

Figure 4.1: The Mazapan Map (after Boone 2000:374)

The so called ‘Mazapan Map’ (Figure 4.1), a copy from a lost original, formed part of 16th-century records of farmlands and land ownership (Arreola 1922). The ruins of Teotihuacan cover the bottom portion of the ‘map’: the Pyramid of the Moon is at bottom left, with the avenida, paralleling the map’s edge, extending past the Pyramid of the Sun (bottom center) to the large, open rectangular shape of the ciudadela at the bottom right. Nahuatl glyphs, the pictographic-ideographic language of the Aztecs, give name places and identify personages as landowners. The glyph next to the upside down, stepped image of the Pyramid of the Sun (bottom center), does not identify it as the “tower or hill of the sun” (whereas a glyph next to the stepped image at the lower left identifies it as the “tower or hill of the moon” [ytzacual metzli]), but rather indicates that the monument serves as the boundary of agricultural fields. Similarly, the ciudadela is identified as the “place of burials in honor of the sun” [tonali itlaltiloyan], possibly indicating an awareness of the mass, dedicatory burials beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent (Boon 2000:373). The large personage in the center of the ciudadela (lower right) is labeled as the current landowner of the land encompassing the ciudadela, and possibly the majority of the site in 1560.

Another complimentary ‘map’ (Figure 4.2), published in 1580 in the Relación geográfica de San Juan Teotihuacán, emphasizes the road network emanating from the Aztec (and then Spanish) administrative center (Tenochtítlan) to the regions on the north of the Valley of Mexico. Like the Mazapan map, it is oriented with north to the left. Tenochtítlan can be seen at the crossroads (center right). The ruins of Teotihuacan are shown (highlighted with expanded image) near the center, approximating the correct geographical relationship to the administrative capital, with the distinctive layout of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the avenida outlined by smaller structures. The ciudadela is not apparent in this depiction. Rather than Nahuatl glyphs, the map’s labels are presented only in Spanish (a testament to the rapid changes in the intervening twenty years of Spanish domination). The ruins are identified as the “oracle of Moctezuma’s”, which the accompanying text explains is where the Aztec ruler and his priests would pilgrimage every twenty days (a significant number for the calendric system of Mesoamerica) to offer sacrifices. The Aztec oracle is mentioned in other post-Conquest texts, and this map suggests that Teotihuacan was the place of the imperial prognosticator (Boone 2000:386-7).

Figure 4.2: Map of Teotihuacan from relación de Tequizistlán y su partido (from Matos Moctezuma 2003:32).

Obviously, little can be inferred about the intentions of the creators of these 1560 and 1580 images. What were the goals in depicting these spatial relationships? Clearly, depicting land ownership and transportation networks was important for the Spanish in the years following the Conquest. Both of these mechanisms – the division of lands amongst the conquistadores through the establishment of large haciendas and the unification of the new Spanish territory using (mostly pre-existing) roads – were of importance for Spanish rule (Lockhart 1992). It suggests both maps were an attempt to clarify through visualization these important attributes of the region for purposes of managing the resources and newly conquered people of the region. Visually imbedded within these concerns, the depictions of Teotihuacan, its individual monuments and identifying place-names, create the impression of the archaeological site as an important nexus involved in a variety of associations - religious, mythic, legal, economic – at the end of the 16th-century. Without overextending what is available in the colonial sources, it seems to have been very much part of the relations of the region. Without the developed cartographic convention of selecting particular phenomena to be visualized in maps (the decision to prioritize accurate spatial relationships above all other information; Black 1997, 2000), these colonial maps retain much of the alternate, or ‘background’ relationships (not restricted to spatial), which link the ruins of the site to other concerns relevant to the populations of the Teotihuacan Valley and the Basin of Mexico.

Forward to Systematic mapping and urbanization studies of Teotihuacan

Containments

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