Glyphs as Place-Making in the Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (c. 1540)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Uppsala Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan depicts the Basin of Mexico circa 1540, just decades after the Spanish invasion. Created by Nahua mapmakers, it presents the only early colonial representation of the city and its surrounding basin from a Nahua perspective amidst a moment of dramatic cultural and environmental upheaval. Scholars have long characterized the map as heavily influenced by western European pictorial tradition, citing its naturalistic representation of the basin and its topography. However, this characterization minimizes the signifying capacity of Central Mexican place glyphs, of which there are almost two hundred, as constitutive of the Indigenous place-making strategies that the mapmakers enacted in the creation of the map. By integrating glyphic imagery into their naturalistic representation of landscape, the mapmakers incorporated symbolic, cosmological, and cultural information tied to places and sites embedded in the collective memory of the Nahua mapmakers and their communities. This paper offers an analysis of the interplay between the glyphs and the composition of the map as way to explore how the Nahua mapmakers wielded glyphs as part of a relational discourse in which they actively forged meanings of place amidst colonial transformation through intentional compositional and iconographic choices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Emplacement and Relational Approaches to the Ancient Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52876