Transportation or Transformation?: Road Depictions in Relaciones Geográficas of 16th-Century New Spain

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The 16th century was a time of extraordinary cultural exchange in Central Mexico. The heterogeneous indigenous populations interacted with recently arrived Spanish and the Creole populations. In this paper, I examine one manifestation of these peoples’ concepts of place, space, and movement as visually represented in maps. Focusing on the sixty-nine maps created in response to a questionnaire sent by the official cartographer of Spain’s King Philip II allows for a close examination of how different scribes from different cultural backgrounds treat the same prompt. These hybrid maps hold a record of cross-cultural interactions and how these groups viewed place and space differently. I focus on the use of footprints by indigenous scribes to show their different perception of roads from that of the Spanish. I contend that the ways scribes reflected their sense of place and space through depictions of roads, the movement from place to place, and in particular the use of footprints is intimately connected to indigenous creation myths, migration narratives and ultimately their quotidian experience of roads.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25590