The Role of History, Ancestry, and Alliance in the Place of Noxtepec, Guerrero, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the special collections of the Latin American Library at Tulane University is a tracing made by William Spratling of an original *lienzo map centered on the town of Noxtepec, Guerrero. Painted by a *tlacuilo, the *lienzo likely dates to the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known piece exemplifies the carto-historic genre of Native map-making that became a popular means employed by Native towns in New Spain to document their communal history and their leader's ancestry in order to keep control of lands and properties. In this paper, I highlight those aspects of the *Lienzo de Noxtepec that speak of a town history that extends into the prehispanic period. Exploits like a defeat of the Aztecs, acceptance of Christianity, and fealty to Spanish authority, I contend, would also have helped to enhance the town’s standing among its neighbors in an ethnically diverse and dynamic province of the former empire. Native communities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region used a similar strategy in later pictorial documents like the *Lienzo de Tlaxcala created and encoded with a history of alliance with Cortés and conversion to Catholicism to support claims by Native elites to land and tribute promised to allies of the Spanish conquistadores.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32070