the invention of maya cartography in early colonial yucatán.pdf

8/11/2019 The Invention of Maya Cartography in Early Colonial Yucatn.pdf

1/16

Circles of Creation: The Invention of Maya Cartography in Early Colonial YucatnAuthor(s): Amara L. SolariSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 92, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 154-168Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29546119 .Accessed: 08/09/2014 13:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/29546119?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/29546119?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa


2/16

Circles of Creation: The Invention of Maya Cartographyin Early Colonial Yucatan

Amara L. Solan

In March 1842, after six months spent surveying the ancient

Maya ruins of Guatemala and southern Mexico, American

lawyer and amateur explorer John Lloyd Stephens (18051852) and his expedition team emerged from the overgrownforest of central Yucatan and entered the small colonial town

of Mani.1 Prompted by accounts of "ancient relics" still in

the possession of Mani's Maya residents, Stephens hoped the

town would lend insight into the region's pre-Columbian

past, given its establishment on the ruins of a Maya city inthe early years of European occupation.2 Before the conquest,the Xiu lineage had dominated the politically prominent city,

which, because of its early alliance with the Spaniards in the1540s, was selected as headquarters for the Franciscan order's

sixteenth-century evangelical campaign. However, the interven?

ing centuries had largely ignored the town and its grand mo?nastic complex, which by themid-nineteenth century had fadedinto the sleepy little town visited by Stephens and his cohort

(Fig. 1).Stephens began the following day by questioning Maya

community leaders about the existence of the purported"relics." Surprisingly, they cooperated, presenting Stephens

with a cotton cloth painting depicting a European-style coatof arms surrounded by the illustrated heads of local Maniinhabitants murdered in 1537 by a neighboring lineage, the

Cocoms of Sotuta (Fig. 2).3 The Mani residents' possession of

this historical artifact caused Stephens to mistakenly differ?

entiate this population from the other Maya communities he

had visited in the past year, attributing to the people ofMania supposed atypical interest in regional history:

. . . day after day we rode into places unknown beyond the

boundaries of Yucatan, with no history attached to them....

Mani, however, rises above the rest, and, compared with the

profound obscurity or the dim twilight in which other places are

enveloped, its history is plainly written. . . . [Mani] was the first

and only instance in which we met with any memorial in the

hands of the Indians, tending to keep alive the memory of anyevent in their history.4

Once handed physical evidence of the native population'shistorical interest, Stephens asked after the existence of ad?

ditional "memorials."5 The alcalde mayor (chief judicial offi?cial) willingly granted Stephens access to the municipal pa?pers housed in the town's casa real, or town hall, where he

brought to light a manuscript now recognized as the earliest

surviving example of Yucatec Mayan written in Latin script, atextual account of the 1557 Mani Land Treaty and its associ?

ated map (Fig. 3).Stephens discovered, housed between the torn and faded

leather covers, the Mani Land Treaty Map, included as theearliest document of the "Xiu Chronicles," a collection of

documents dating between 1557 and 1813 that record the

history of the Xiu family.6 The manuscript, composed in

Yucatec Mayan, was largely illegible to the North American.Nonetheless, Stephens recognized specific place-names in

the text, such as the impressive pre-Columbian city of Ux

mal, which the expedition team had visited earlier and whichthe expedition's resident draftsman, Frederick Catherwood

(1799-1854), had recorded (Fig. 4). Convinced of the doc?ument's importance, Stephens set about the task of transcrib?

ing the map, glossing it as "Indian Map" (Fig. 5).7 Simplyrendered in black ink, the 1557 map features a circular

composition, defined by a ring of two superimposed circleswhose exterior is punctuated with pictographlike cross for?

mations and annotated place-names. Inside the round form,

theprovince

of Mani and itsdependent

towns aredepicted,laid out in a schematic map. Each settlement is signified by a

unique church toponym and linked to neighboring commu?nities by thin black lines, representing footpaths.

While Stephens considered this cartograph, with its seem?

ingly idiosyncratic circular format, "curious," at this historical

moment he could not have recognized that all territorial

representations created by Maya artists-scribes during the

earliest decades of the colonial period relied on a nearlyidentical composition.8 That is, the format of The Mani Land

TreatyMap is the normative mode of indigenous spatial rep?resentations produced in the second half of the sixteenth

century. This corpus includes maps of native authorship pro?duced for administrative purposes, such as The Mani Land

Treaty Map, and also cartographs drawn beyond the watchful

eyes of the Franciscan friars for specifically indigenous uses,such as those found in native manuscripts (Fig. 6). The sheer

ubiquity of this compositional form, utilized throughout the

northern Yucatan, and also later in the regions of Tabasco

and Oaxaca (Fig. 7), suggests that this visualization of terri?

tory was directly derived from indigenous spatial imaginingsin existence long before the colonial "invention" of native

cartography.9 That is, the round maps invented in the earlycolonial period cannot be attributed to recent Europeaninfluence or a pre-Columbian cartographic practice, as one

has yet to come to light. Rather, this compositional form is acolonial invention, derived from pre-Columbian spatial con?

ceptions, which understood space, and particularly one's

home territory, in circular terms.

Ironically, while Stephens was surprised by the Mani resi?

dents' ability to "cling with desperate and fatal tenacity to thememory of those ancestors whom they did not know," he was

unaware that the "curious" composition of the Mani map and

all other Maya maps can be directly tied to their function of

visualizing local history, specifically, localized tales of cosmo

genesis. Like indigenous maps produced elsewhere in Mesoamerica and beyond, the maps drawn and painted in the

Maya area illustrate a uniquely native conception of space,and the circular maps portray a "communicentric" view of

This content downloaded from 1 32.248.9.8 on Mon, 8 Sep 201 4 13:16:54 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/16

1 The monastic complex of Mani,

completed mid-16th century(photograph by Erik J. Petersen)

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN FARLY COLONIAL YUCATAN I55

localized territory, since they image the role of individualcommunities in moments of the world's creation.10

The form and composition used in these early indigenouscartographs visually reflect a narrative device found in an

account of the ninth-century conquest of the peninsula bythe Itza. The tale is recorded in "The Book of the Chilam

Balam of Chumayel," a colonial-period manuscript written in

Yucatec Mayan, but its contents surely originated in preColumbian

codices, makingit a rare, albeit

hybridized,source of insight into indigenous ideologies.11 While thisaccount, which I refer to as the Itza Invasion Episode, was

presented as a historical tale, a closer linguistic and narrative

analysis reveals that it was self-consciously recast as a primor?dial story of creation, fusing cosmogenic narratives and ter?

ritorial description. This creation story served as a model for

indigenous circular cartography, allowing Maya mapmakersto conceptualize a link between time and space (or, more

concretely, history and community territory) and thus ironi?

cally represent the interest in "history" that Stephens denied

for all Maya peoples save the residents of Mani.

Maya k'atun Wheels as Calendrical CartographyUnlike Western modern temporal reckonings, which typically

relyon

linearityas an

organizingstructure, ancient Me

soamericans conceived of time as both cyclical and linear,

evidenced by their multiple and varied calendrical systems,many of which operated simultaneously and congruently.12

During the course of the pre-Columbian era, some of these

many calendars fell out of use, and by the late post-Classicperiod (1250-1519 CE), the years just preceding the SpanishConquest, Yucatec peoples relied primarily on the k'atun

cycle (or alternatively, the "Short Count" or "period-ending

dating"), an abbreviation of Classic period (250-850 CE)calendars composed of thirteen cycles of approximately 20

years (19.71 years) to total 256.25 years.13 Each of the thir?teen k'atun was referred to by the date the cycle completed,

typically rendered with an ahau glyph partnered with the

cycle's numerical coefficient (13Ahau, 8 Ahau, 2Ahau, andso on).14 In the colonial manuscripts, this calendar was com?

monly imaged as a circle, or radial wheel, ringed by the daynames of the thirteen named katun cycles (Figs. 8, 9).15

The compositional similarity between katun wheels andthe round

mapsof the colonial

periodhas

longbeen

recog?nized.1() These renderings of the k'atun appear in manu?

scripts of both Spanish and indigenous authorship, testifyingto their prominence in Yucatec knowledge production. In

fact, Diego de Landa (1524-1579), the second bishop ofYucatan, included one in his Relation de las cosas de Yucatan, a

manuscript compiled in the 1560s detailing Maya lifeways,making it the earliest known graphic representation of a

k atun wheel (Fig. 8).17 Landa's image, presumably derived

from k'atun wheels of native authorship that he had viewed, is

composed of three concentric circles, divided into thirteen

compartments, each housing the ahau glyph and associated

numerical notation to refer to a specific k'atun cycle. Landa

marked the top of the circle with a crosslike formation,

orienting the image toward the east and demonstrating in

visual form theconceptual

link betweenspace

and time for

the early colonial Maya people.This intersection of time and directionality is even more

apparent in other images of the k'atun cycle, in particular,those completed in manuscripts written for and by indige?nous scribes, such as "The Book of the Chilam Balam ofKaua," of about 1824 (Fig. 9).18 In this example, the wheel is

composed of four concentric circles, the small centermost

form labeled "Mundo," earth. Each k'atun cycle is again ref?

erenced by a glyphic component, here a highly Europeanizedhead with the associated numerical notations rendered in



4/16

156 ARI BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2010 VOLUME XCIINUMBER 3

2 The memorial to the massacre at Otzmal (drawing byMatthew Restall after the 17th-century drawing in Diego Lopezde Cogolludo, Les Ires sighs de In domination espanola en Yucatan

[Merida, Mex.: Manuel Aldana Rivas, 1867-68], vol. 3, plate VI)

Arabic numerals. Above each ahau glyph, the artist has included

additional names from the tzolk'in alendar (260 days). TheKaua artist, as in Landa's example, utilized a cross to designatethe east, but here, given the textual inclusion of lakin, the Mayan

word for east, the indigenous significance of this direction ismore concrete. Correspondingly, the left side of the circle isglossed with xaman, north, the bottom with chikin, west, and

finally the right with nohol, south. The intercardinal directionswere also marked by two intersecting lines terminating in brack?

etlike flourishes on the exterior of the outer circle.

With the explicit inclusion of directional indicators withinthe composition of k'atun calendar wheels, a conceptual link

is constructed between the seemingly irreconcilable dimen?

sions of space and time. Contrary toWestern modern spatial

conceptions,where a circle evokes

imagesof the

sphericalearth, for the colonial Maya, the circle references the world's

terrestrial plane, whose outer edges are defined with specificdirectionalities. This association is apparent in a ceremonial

artifact, excavated from the early post-Classic city of Mayap?n,located in northwest Yucatan. Ritually deposited as part of ak 'atun-endmg ritual, the small-scale ceramic takes the form of

a turtle whose carapace is ringed by a series of thirteen ahau

glyphs (Fig. 10). In Mesoamerican cultures, the earth wasoften conceived as the back of a turtle, suggesting an identi?fication of this figurine as a representation of the world,

encompassed by the most common calendrical system of

post-Classic Yucatan, the k'atun cycle.19 These textual and

material artifacts attest to the circle's ability to function as an

abstract cosmogram with temporal indicators, since the cited

directionsmark the

sun's daily path from theeastern

horizonto the west, and thus the passage of time.

With their directional and territorial connotations, k'atun

wheels should not be understood as mere recordings of

temporal passages. Instead, these colonial artifacts func?

tioned as a kind of calendrical cartography; they provided a

mapping of space that embodied both a physical and tempo?ral dimensionality. Representations of territory were of sec?

ondary importance in k 'atun wheels, often only incidentallyincluded in some versions, such as Landa's transcription,

demonstrating their authors' primary interest in time com?

putations. In the colonial period, though, these prioritiesshifted. As Spanish authorities demanded images of land,boundaries, and frontiers, Maya artists relied on their preColumbian calendrical cartographs as models, omitting the

overtreferences

tocalendrical

concerns.However, for indig?

enous artists and viewers, the circular form itself retained a

deeper level of historical significance, allowing native agentsto maintain?in pictorial form?schematized accounts of

their cosmogenic beginnings.

The Mani Land Treaty and the Creation of MayaCartographyThe manuscript and accompanying map transcribed by Ste?

phens in 1842 documents a land treaty oncluded by YucatecMaya lineages in the summer of 1557.20 Fifteen years earlier,when Francisco de Montejo officially "conquered" the prov?ince with his establishment of Merida on the ruins of the

Maya city of Tiho in 1542, he found the peninsula dividedinto sixteen sovereign territories, individually controlled by a

single lineageor

alternatively loose federations of individu?ally led cities (Fig. II).21 Given the paucity of arable land inthe peninsula, these families continually disputed their

boundary lines in the hopes of controlling ever larger terri?tories and thus ensuring their people's survival.22 To ease this

source of dispute, the Spanish authorities demanded that the

indigenous leaders formally set their provincial boundaries as

a means to simplify processes of ideological conquest, and in

August 1557, they organized a meeting to this end. On Au?gust 15, the governors of the primary Xiu towns met in the

capital, Mani, the city the Europeans considered most neu?

tral. The Xiu then invited neighboring lineage heads and

accompanying governmental officials to witness the formal

walking of their territory, rewarding the visitors with sump?tuous gifts and feasting. All of the lineage heads (save theinfamous

leaderof

the Cocoms, Nachi Cocom of Sotuta, whofeigned illness to avoid the meetings but sent ambassadors inhis stead) convened at the monastery of Mani.23 Under theattentive supervision of the monastery's resident priests, the

Maya leaders walked the periphery of the Mani territory,clearly delineating their rightful land from that of their

neighbors. A known scribe, Gaspar Antonio Chi, a Christian?

ized Maya elite of the Xiu and Chi lineages, recorded the

proceedings and created the accompanying map.24While Stephens had the privilege of being the first North

American to view the Mani Land Treaty account of 1557,



5/16


6/16

158 ART BULLETIN SEPTKMBER 201 0 VOLUME XCII NUMBER 3

p p??^^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^H^^^^^HE^^|KA^^^F^HwH^HE?/ Monjas?* :^^^^^^^^^^K^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^HI^^^^Hh^J^^^U| ?^HKSRStf from 7^/'.s/ ncientonumentsmB&S^^^^^^^^Bft Central merica,ondon: .Catherwood,

^^B^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^gff^^ff^^J^p^-- VmS^^^K^^^^^ 1844,i. (artworkn he ublic^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^^^^^^SBK-'--^^^^^^^ ^'"^?M5 tt^IvJ^


7/16

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN EARLY COLONIAL YUCATAN 159

?

2S57

*r ?-v-v.INDIAN MAP

'*

?5 ??:?{?;??-> ' ?? ? ?'?v., * r:.

?* x. ?, i: ?? .. ?? ? ? ?? ?.

5 Charles Copley, after John Lloyd Stephens, Indian Map,from Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1843, between 264 and 265.

Special Collections, Oregon State University (artwork in the

public domain)

duction.32 During the next four centuries, Maya scribes re?

peatedly transcribed the text, altering some tales, insertingothers into the "wrong" narrative place within the calendrical

katun counts, and, most interestingly, incorporating narra?

tive and ritual references to the newly introduced Christian

religion.33 The manuscript reached its completed form be?

tween 1824 and 1837.34Since this process occurred far away from the watchful eyes

ofChumayel's

resident Catholicpriests,

"The Book of theChilam Balam of Chumayel" is a highly hybridized textualand visual artifact that records features of the pre-Columbiannative worldview and also documents the self-conscious ap?

propriation and adaptation of Christianity into indigenousbelief systems.35 t isa colonial artifact that reflects the local?ized perception of the Chumayel Maya living amid the phys?ical, psychological, and ideological chaos of the early colonial

period. As such, the account ishighly localized, told from the

perspective of Chumayel residents. All tales included withinthe manuscript should be viewed as historical constructions,

6 The Bird Map of Yucatan, compiled late 18th century, from"The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel," Princeton

Mesoamerican MSS, no. 4, The Princeton University Library(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by The

Princeton University Library)

designed by the Maya elders of Chumayel as they negotiatedtheir contemporary colonial reality.

One such localized tale, what scholars have termed the

Hunak K'elEpic,

recounts theinfighting

within the Itza, oneof the ruling lineages that controlled the peninsula in thetwelfth century and thought by some to be ancestors of the

Xiu. This dispute resulted in the fall of the Itza capital city,Chichen Itza, in the thirteenth century and the city of Mayapan's subsequent rise to power at the hands of culture hero

Hunak K'el.36 Midway through the Hunak K'el story, theChumayel text falls back chronologically four hundred years,

violently interrupting the narrative flow of the later history.This section recalls a much earlier period of Yucatec history,the original ninth-century invasion and colonization by the Itza,

or the Itza Invasion Episode. The deep recession into time

suggests that the Itza Invasion Episode should be treated and

analyzed as a self-contained story. A later explanatory interrup?tion breaks the Itza Invasion Episode itself into two distinctsections, an initial nd a final invasion,

segmentingthe tale into

three distinct sections or chapters and thus dividing the HunakK'el story into five chapters, which can be segmented as:

I. First section of the Hunak K'el Epic (thirteenth entury)II. First section of the Itza Invasion Episode (ninth century)III. Explanatory interruption of the Itza Invasion Episode(sixteenth century)IV. Second section of the Itza Invasion Episode (ninth cen?

tury)V. Second section of the Hunak K'el Epic (thirteenth cen?

tury)



8/16

150 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 20 10 VOLUME XCII NUMBER 3

7 The Relation Geogr?fica ap ofTeozacoalco, 1580, 54% X 69lA in.

(138 X 176 cm). The Benson LatinAmerican Collection, The General

Libraries, The University of Texas atAustin (artwork in the public domain;photograph provided by The NettieLee Benson Latin American Col?

lection, The General Libraries, The

University of Texas at Austin)

8 Katun Wheel (drawing by Felicia Phillips after the 16th-centurydrawing in Landa, Rela??n de las cosas de Yucatan, 1941)

While the insertion of the Itza Invasion Episode into themiddle of the Hunak K'el Epic might be taken as a scribalerror, made during the document's complex transcription

history, the tale's structural format is instrumental in eluci?

dating the cartographic style of the colonial Maya. It appearsas though this story, and presumably others that mirror its

composition now lost to the contemporary world, provided

9 K'atun Wheel(drawing by

FeliciaPhillips

after thedrawingca. 1824 from "The Book of the Chilam Balam of Kaua")

the mental template from which Gaspar Antonio Chi andother Maya mapmakers invented a distinctly native carto?

graphic practice in the early colonial period.37In the first ection of the Itza Invasion Episode, the initial

Itza conquest of the Yucatan is related, a process that surelytook decades to complete. The foreigners traveled in a coun?

terclockwise direction, circumscribing the northern penin



9/16

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN EARLY COLONIAL YUCATAN \Q\

10 Profile of stone turtle found at Mayap?n and interred as

part of a k ?/im-ending ritual. Note the six ahau glyphs carvedaround the carapace rim (drawing by the author after Tatiana

Proskouriakoff, "The Artifacts of Mayap?n," in Mayap?n,Yucatan, Mexico, ed. Harry E. D. Pollock et al. [Washington,D.C.:

CarnegieInstitution of

Washington, 1962], fig. g)

11 Map of the Yucatan Peninsula with precontact kingdomsdelineated (drawing by the author)

sulawith the ring of their path, which consists of a loose circleof sixty-nine settlements. Predictably, the Jaguar Priest de?

scribes the Itza as beginning their invasion of the peninsula

from the east,the direction in

Mayaworldview associated with

beginnings and their metaphoric connotations, such as birth,foundation, and creation in general.38 Ppoole (P'oole)

was

the first settlement visited or established by the Itza, located

midway down the Yucatan's eastern coastline. From the sea?

side, the ancestors moved in a northwestern direction and

slowlymade their way across the peninsula, establishing Panabha as their eleventh and northernmost city. They then

walked toward the west, culminating their westward migra?tion at the city of Kinchil, their forty-first stablished settle?

ment. The southern movement began from Kinchil, and at

12 Map of the Xiu province, with Mani Land Treatylandmarks (drawing by the author)

their sixtieth stop they established the town of Tixmeuac.

Finally, they traveled back toward the east, completing their

journey at the sixty-ninth settlement of Cetelac. By the end of

the invasion, the group had completely circumambulated the

northern section of Yucatan, leaving little, if any, territoryunscouted (Fig. 13).

The first section of the Itza Invasion Episode consists of

sixty-nine action events that chronicle the Itza foundation of

settlements, many of which can be correlated with contem?

porary towns. By and large, this section is narrated in a listlike

formula,at times a mere

tallyof

vanquished cities,and

rep?resents the most simplistic language used in the entirety ofthe Hunak K'el Epic, relying on only four distinct phrasetypes. Beginning with the most complex phrasing, for twentyfive towns the narrator records not only the city's foundation,

referred to as an Itza "arrival," but also a single event in which

the invaders participated. Here, for example, is the account

of how Itza's first town, Ppoole, was established: "Whereupon

they departed and arrived at Ppoole, where the remainder of

the Itza were increased by number; they took the women of

Ppoole as their mothers."39 An elaboration of this basic struc?

ture is the occasional concluding remark "as it is called," "so

they said," or "as they said," formally reiterating the ancestral

construction of this story by emphasizing the tale as oft

repeated legend. By far the most common phrase type is the

simplest,a

phrasethat

merelystates the

appearanceof the

Itza in the city, prompting the narrative to be performed andread as a mere list:

Then they went to Ppuztunich.Then they went to Pucnalchac.

Then they went to Ppencuyut.Then they went to Paxuuet.

Then they arrived at Tixaya.Then they arrived at Tiztiz, as it is called.Then they arrived at Chican.

. . .40



10/16

162 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2010 VOLUME XCII NUMBER 3

13 Map of the Yucatan Peninsula, with the Itza Invasion route inscribed (drawing by the author)

The essential structuring element of this narrative is a se?

quentially ordered chronology, but it is a chronology withoutthe defining limits of a delineated temporal system. A date isnot given for the initial Itza arrival, nor is the length of their

stay at specific loci provided. However, the linear, flowing,event-based narrative leaves little doubt as to the sequence of

named events; the Itza clearly begin their journey at Ppoole,continue to sixty-eight more cities, and end their journey at

Cetelac. Absent fixed or absolute time, that leaves space as

the ordering principle of this "historical" narrative, suggest?

ing the hazy time of primordial beginnings.The Chumayel narrator marked the end of the Itza

Invasion's first section by the sudden and complete aban?

donment of the listlike narrative style in favor of theloosest literary language used in the tale. After relating the

initial invasion's completion with the founding of Cetelac,the Chumayel Jaguar Priest furnished a detailed and highly

hybridized explanation of the nature of the invasion tale

and what it recounts.

These are the names of whatever towns there were and thenames of the wells, in order that it may be known where they

passed in their march to see whether the district was good,whether it was suitable for settlement here. They set in order thenames of the district according to the command of our Lord

God. He itwas who set the land in order. He created everythingon earth.... But these were the people who named the district,who named the wells, who named the villages, who named the

land because no one had arrived here in this neck of land whenwe arrived here.41

According to this explanation, the Itza invaded the Yucatan

Peninsula in pursuit of arable land ("to seewhether the districtwas good, whether it was suitable for settlement here"). The

Jaguar Priest also clarified that it was "our Lord God," theChristian godhead, who was responsible for the ordering of

the territory, but his ancestors named the various topographiesbecause "no one had arrived here in this neck of the land when

we arrived here." By insisting on his ancestors' responsibility of

naming, and thereby conveniently ignoring more ancient Yu

catec peoples, their place-names, and their history, the JaguarPriest intentionally transformed the historical Itza Invasion into

a tale of primordial beginnings.A linguistic analysis of the city names codified by the Itza

during the tale's first section also attests to the primordialnature of this story. As mentioned above, when the Itza

established particular cities, they are often described as en?

gaging in a particular anecdotal event. Of the twenty-fivecities that are granted an associated narrative event, twentythree of these toponyms are linguistically derived from the

event enacted by the Itza in that very locale (see app. 1 for a

sampling of these linguistic derivations).42 For example, at

their first stop, Ppoole, the city isdenoted as the place where"the remainder of the Itza were increased in number." As

Roys rightfully noted, the place-name Ppoole functions as a

pun on the event that transpired there; ppohal can be directlytranslated as "to be increased in numbers."43 This relation

between city name and anecdotal event also defines the

place-name of the Itza's second stop, a city named Ake. The

narrator adds aqualifying

secondphrase

to this section of thetale, characterizing this city as the place "where they were

born," conceivably referring to the progeny of the Itza who

began the invasion in the previous polity, Ppoole. Whenthe place-name Ake is linguistically deconstructed, it is

discovered that its root, ak, can be directly translated as

something recently made, green, or fresh.44 Hence, "Ake"

can be glossed as the place where they were recently madeor born.

The narrative function of the relation between place-nameand event is to implicate the Itza in the foundation of these cities



11/16

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN EARLY COLONIAL YUCAT?N I53

regardless of this population's provenance prior to the ninth

century invasion. This serves to situate the Itza in the Yucatan at

the moment of its creation and relegate the towns of the first

part of the invasion to that of primordial beginnings. Given the

narrative's purposeto

shapeits invasions as

foundation events,the circular form utilized in this primordial migration is per?fectly fitting. he spherical processional route replicates on a

grand scale the ritual path traditionally ssociated with foundational events such as the establishment of individual cities. For a

civic founding, townspeople circumambulated in a counter?

clockwise circuit, physically delineating the geographic bordersof the town.45 This processional reproduced exactly the chro?

nological order of the creation of the directional world trees

(north, west, south, and east) as recalled in an additional section

of "The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel."46 With thisritual action, towns reenacted the creation of the universe,

demonstrating the community's rehearsal of both primordialevents and the continuation of cosmic history. Given the indig?enous view of time as cyclical, each founding could be consid?

ered notonly

as a reenactment but also as aregression

into

primordial moments of creation, fusing cosmic time with the

community's own narrative history and explaining the recastingof the historical Itza Invasion as a cosmogenic event.

After the Jaguar Priest completed his "off-the-cuff expla?nation of the primordial Itza Invasion, he began the Invasion

Episode's second section. In this portion of the tale, the Itza

ancestors similarly establish Yucatec cities, but unlike in the

first Itza Invasion, a greater level of historical specificity is

included.47 The unifying factor among this seemingly ran?

dom list of cities, totaling 102, is that in comparison to thetowns mentioned in the first invasion, the cities conquered in

the second section played more prominent roles in Yucatec

history, including references to known Yucatec lineages and

particular ritual actions.48 An observable migration route

cannot bediscerned

for thesecond invasion,

nor canthe

majority of the names be linguistically linked to anecdotalevents, as could the place-names of the first invasion. The

lack of a circular course suggests that the events that tran?

spired in these locales were understood as historical, not

primordial. Their physical location within the province sup?ports this theory; all but one (Sanhil) is located within thecircle of creation delineated by the first migration, indicatinga substantive difference between settlements of the first and

second Itza invasions (Fig. 13).The structural difference displayed in the telling of "pri?

mordial" versus "historical" Yucatec history provides evidence

for the kinds of spatial imaginings that resulted in the circu?lar maps of the colonial period. When the Itza journey is

grafted onto a contemporary and mathematically "accurate"

mapof the northern Yucatan

Peninsula,a

pattern emerges.The Itzas' path roughly follows a circular shape that delin?eates a counterclockwise course around the region (Fig. 13).In their migration path, the Itza circumscribed the northernsection of the peninsula and thereby enclosed the major

Yucatec cities in the center of their route. This form is toodeliberate to be accidental, pointing to an intentional designon the part of the Maya narrator and a culturally constructed

perception of primordial spaces of creation. By utilizing this

spatial sequence of form, the Jaguar Priest supplied a meta

phoric link between known accounts of creation and the

ninth-century conquest. Both the creation of the cosmos and

the conquest of the Yucatan were accomplished utilizing this

counterclockwise circular route. In all accounts, indications

of time are absent and space itself becomes the organizing

principle; it isa

spatial history. Omitting chartable historicaltime implies that these events transpired within the hazyprimordial time of cosmogenesis, despite their known occur?

rence in the ninth century.We can imagine a circular map that sets down a visual image

of the story (Fig. 14). Of course, this isonly my rendering, but

given the evidence of the circular route, combined with the

explanatory interruption that serves to segment the two sections

of the story, it can be argued that the story's visualization is that

of a chain of towns conquered in primordial time composing a

ringed composition. The towns mentioned in the second sec?

tion of the conquest that are known from other historical

sources and thus reference historical time appear in the center

of the composition, the area that actually serves to make visual

the local identities of the story-map's creator, a person of the

Xiulineage

who resided in or nearChumayel.

TheMani Land Treaty MapOf the Mani Land Treaty's three extant copies, described

above, I examine the map included in the "Xiu Chronicles"

(Fig. 3), as this is the most faithful transcription of the

original document produced during the Mani meetings in

August 1557. At the bequest of Spanish officials, GasparAntonio Chi produced the cartograph.49 In this regionalmap, Chi situated the capital of the Xiu territory, ani, in thecenter of the composition. He symbolically represented his

capital city with a thumbnail illustration of the city's Fran?ciscan monastic complex built only a decade earlier on the

ruins of Mani's primary pre-Columbian pyramid. The Xiu's

other towns are similarly signified by carefully differentiated

church pictographs and are linked to the capital by straightlines, presumably signifying roads or pathways. Demonstrat?

ing his local knowledge, Chi depicted each local pictographas a unique structure and therefore transformed the signsinto toponyms, symbolic referents to named geographic lo?

cations.50 He glossed the name of each town in Latin char?

acters in close proximity to the accompanying toponyms.Chi inscribed the settlements surrounding Xiu domina?

tion, which were dependent on other family lineages, be?

tween the double embedded lines of the map's framingcircle. He chose to render these peripheral cities, unlike the

towns in the center of the composition, with identical square

shaped structures surmounted by crosses, presumably signi?

fying chapels. These symbols are not individualized so as to

function as distinct toponyms; instead, they are mere picto?

graphsmeant to denote "town" in an abstract sense. Above

the circular form lies a list of linked place-names, an addi?

tional schematized view of foreign territories located to thenortheast and east of the Xiu province.

Despite the presence of Spaniards during theMani confer?ence (the Tulane document specifically recognizes a Spanishjudge, Felipe Manrique, as supervising the establishment ofthe border near Uxmal), it is unlikely that these colonistsinfluenced the document's manufacture. Chi's European

style education clearly did not include cartographic trainingin the Spanish mode, forcing him to rely on his uniquely



12/16

1(54 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2010 VOLUME XCII NUMBER 3

East

North

14 Transposition of the Itza Invasion

Episode as a round Maya map of thecolonial period (drawing by theauthor)

indigenous spatial perception, which understood east as the

prominent direction of the universe. The preference given to

east as the organizing direction is in line with other earlycolonial indigenous representations of space from the Amer?

icas, which points to this map's native production.51 At the

center point of the composition, Mani becomes the physicalpivot of the entire province, although Mani does not geomet?

rically inhabit the exact center of the Xiu territory. Chi

positioned all of the dependent Xiu towns according to theirrelative spatial relation with Mani; their physical organizationis not precise in terms of a geometric grid, but their locations

roughly correspond to their actual directional alignments.The top of the map marks the eastern-northeastern limit of

the province, signaled by the town of Teabo. The artist placedOxkutzcab to the right of Mani, designating the southern

edge of the province, while Mama on the left side of thedocument marks the territory's northern boundary.

Compositionally, the circle segregates towns that weredeemed more central to Xiu history and contemporary real?

ity from those that were not under their domain and there?

fore were considered peripheral. Visually, the document sug?

gests the relative insignificance of towns located within thelines of the circumscribed form: pictorially, they are not givena distinct identity in terms of the graphic referent (they allutilize pictographs and not toponyms) and are all displayedat the exact same distance from the capital city. hose politiesthat are not included under the Xiu domination are granteda structural similarity; they are equally distant from the cap?ital city not in terms of geographic space but in regard to the

communal Mani identity. These peripheral towns have been

effectively "othered" from their Xiu neighbors.

As such, The Mani Land Treaty Map can be understood as acolonial Maya embodiment of what Richard Kagan terms a

"communicentric view."52 In his analysis of early modern cityviews, Kagan discusses artists' tendencies to intentionally ignorethe city's structural physicality, the urbs, in favor of depicting "its

human side, the civitas," by including anecdotal and descriptivedetails such as local costume, ritual, and customs. These com?

municentric views functioned metaphorically, setting forth "the

idea of the city as a community with a special, distinctive char?

acter along with the memories and traditions that served to

distinguish that community from another."53 Obviously, The

Mani Land TreatyMap lacks figurative representations of itscitizens so common in the European city views towhich Kaganrefers, but the idea of a regional identity shere evoked by thecircular cartographic format, which speaks to "memories and

traditions" unique to the citizenry of Mani. The circular formitself serves as a kind of shorthand metaphor, referencing Ma?

ni's role in cosmogonic events.

Regional identity is also signaled in Chi's rendering of theXiu cities. The Maya artist-scribe granted each of the Xiu

dominated "historical" cities a unique toponym to the extent

that even the architectural style of the local parish churchesis identifiable. This conveys a level of attention to communityevents and narrative not granted for the peripheral-primor?dial towns, which are all identified with identical pictographs.Interestingly, even the pre-Columbian city of Uxmal is givenan idiosyncratic glyph; in fact, Uxmal's symbol replicates one



13/16

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN EARLY COLONIAL YUCATAN 1?5

of the most famous architectural structures completed in the

Puuk style, the "Convento," seen in the background of Cath

erwood's lithograph (Fig. 4).54 The particularity with whichChi rendered each glyph suggests that he had a vested inter?est in

pictorially displayingindividual

communityidentities.

Following the structure laid out in the Itza Invasion story thatof primordial time followed by a formal interruption and thenfollowed with historical time), TheMani Land Treaty ap reflectsa visualization of a localized Xiu creation story. To begin with,the peripheral towns are established in a circular arrangement

mirroring the primordial founding of the region in the firstsection of the Itza Invasion Episode.55 Whereas the narrative

structure relies on a formal interruption to separate rhetorically

primordial from historical events, this divide is registered withinmaps by a change in compositional type. The moment of cos

mogonic beginnings is segregated from what follows by a formalbreak from the ringed composition to that of an itinerarymap?interestingly, the cartographic type that speaks directly to

lived spatial experience in European cultures.56 Thus, the "his?

torical"portion

of the Xiu creation(that

whichreplicatesthe second part of the Itza Invasion Episode) isalluded to in the

placement of Mani and her dependent cities in the centerof the cosmos, the obvious location for what residents con?

sidered the world's most influential city.

Admittedly, the actual route followed by Maya elders in1557 during the enactment of the Mani Land Treaty does not

observe an uninterrupted procession around the Mani prov?ince. As mentioned above, the survey was completed in two

parts, beginning at the northern edge of the province:

It ishere at Hoal; this is the name of the well which is on theroad to Tihoo (Merida) to the north of Tichac and where a

cross was placed. Next is Zacmuyalna where a cross was placedat the edge of the lands of the people of Tecoh. The next is

Kochilhaa where a cross was placed. Next is Cheenkeken

where there is a cross. . . .57

After this counterclockwise circuit around the northern and

eastern boundaries was marked, participants returned to the

region's center, Mani, reconvened at the Hoal cenote, and set

out on a clockwise route to chart the western boundaries.

However, Chi's representation of the event ignores this route,

displaying his home territory as an uninterrupted circle, thus

aligning his map with narrative tropes such as that used in theItza Invasion Episode. This serves to idealize both the Mani

territory and the event of the Mani Land Treaty, glossing over

any political strife, which surely dominated the proceedings.Two additional Maya maps from colonial Yucatan and four

others from other regions of New Spain utilize the circle as a

compositional framework, further pointing to the derivation

of thiscartographic

innovation from establishedpre-Colum?bian sources, such as the narrative devices described above.

Interestingly, one of the Maya maps, TheMap of Sotuta, maypredate TheMani Land TreatyMap (it has been proposed thatit was produced in 1545), making it the only circular mapproduced specifically for a native audience and without Span?ish intervention.58 The other Maya examples, The Map of

Acanceh (a 1763 copy of a sixteenth-century map) and The

Map ofTabasco (1581), were drawn specifically at the bequestof Spanish officials, much like the production context of The

Mani Land Treaty Map.59 The similarity between all fourcolonial Maya cartographs makes a convincing case that the

structure of creation narratives furnished an ideologicalframework for imaging colonial spaces.60

This mental template may also have been present in addi?

tional Mesoamerican pre-Columbian societies. The use of

thiscompositional

form is seen in threemaps

from the

region of Oaxaca, two of them submitted as part of Philip IFsRelaciones geogr?ficas project in 1580, The Relation Geogr?ficaMap of Teozacoalco (Fig. 7) and The Map ofAmoltepec.61 hile

it is outside the scope of this study to provide a detailedexamination of these extremely complex Mixtec maps, I note

not only the similarity in composition but also an even more

defined reference to localized historical events, particularlywithin TheMap of Teozacoalco.62 In this cartograph, the artistutilized the circular format to reference localized cosmolo?

gies, but he included detailed references to local history,much like the second section of the Itza Invasion Episode.Within the rings of the circle, on its left hemisphere and also

just outside the circle's left edge, the artist portrayed columnsof paired individuals. These anecdotal figures stand for

named members of the localroyal lineage

and aredisplayedin chronological order, effectively serving to display Teoza

coalco's most recent lived history and linking this Oaxacan

cartographic tradition to that of Yucatan. The compositional

similarity opens up the possibility that this conception ofspace as historically determined may in fact be a Mesoameri?

can, rather than simply a Maya, ideological framework.

Within the context of sixteenth-century New Spain, cartogra?

phy emerged as a distinct visual discourse inwhich numerouscolonial actors performed the cultural negotiations that defined

this early stage of the Spanish Conquest. For many indigenouscommunities, when Spanish authorities demanded representa?tions of home territory, he dictate afforded an opportunity forthe preservation of centuries-old traditional belief systems. In

the case of the colonial Maya of Yucatan, and perhaps theirMixtec

neighborsto the

southwest,the administrative desire for

maps resulted in the creation of a new pictorial genre, a defined

cartographic tradition derived directly from ancient narrative

formats, such as the Itza Invasion Episode preserved in "The

Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel." The resulting visualartifacts, like The Mani Land Treaty Map, were intercultural in

their circular design, recognizable as a map for Spanish audi?

ences. However, for their Maya creators and viewers, the carto

graphs registered notions of primordial creation and the role oftheir home community in this cosmic history, allowing for the

preservation of community identity during the cultural and

physical chaos of colonization.

Amara L. Solari specializes in the rt and cultural production of

pre-ColumbianMesoamerica and

earlycolonial Mexico. She is cur?

rently working on a book-length roject, investigating the ways inwhichMaya conceptions f space and their ssociated visual culture

affected ultural identities nd religious practices in early colonialYucatan [Department ofArt History, thePennsylvania State Uni?

versity, University Park, Pa. 16802, [email protected]].

NotesThis paper was developed from two chapters of my dissertation, "Maya SpatialBiographies in Communal Memory and Cosmic Time: The Franciscan Evan?

gelical Campaign of Itzmal, Yucatan," completed inJune 2007 at the Univer?

sity f California, Santa Barbara. Iwould like to acknowledge the support of



14/16


Appendix 1Translation of Towns "Founded" in the Itza Invasion Episode's First Section

City Name Maya Translation Described Event

P'oole

Ake

TixchelNinum

Chikin-tsonot

Tzuc-oopTah-cabo

KikilPanabha

Cucuchilhaa

p'oolhal= to increase, multiply

ak' = something recently made,

fresh, or greenchel = to stretch out or prolongnum = too manychikin = west

tzuc-ba = aparttah kab = honeycombkikil = bloodypanabha

= artificial well

kuchil = to seat oneself or

guard a place; ha'= water

"where they were increased in number"

"where they were born"

"where their words were prolonged""where their words were too many""where their faces were turned to the west"

"where they remained apart""where they stirred the honey""where they contracted dysentery""where they dug for deep water"

"where they settled at the deep water"

my adviser, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, and committee members, Mark Meadowand Gerardo Aldana. Iwould also like to thank the two anonymous reviewersfor The Art Bulletin who provided insightful commentary, as well as MatthewRestall, Amy J. Buono, and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives for their invaluable assistanceand thoughtful review of this paper's earlier drafts.

1. Stephens's accounts of this and his earlier 1839-40 expedition were

published in 1841 as Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas andYucatan and in 1843 as Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. These widely readand highly romanticized accounts whetted the public imagination with

Stephens's expressive use of hyperbolic language and the inclusion of

beautifully illustrated lithographs completed by the expedition's ac?

companying draftsman, Frederick Catherwood (Fig. 4).2. Friar Villalpando, father of the Yucatec evangelical program, founded

the Mani mission on September 29, 1547, the Day of Michaelmas, andthereby dedicated it to the Archangel Michael. See Richard Perry and

Rosalind Perry, Maya Missions (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Espadana Press,2002), 126.

3. The Xiu-Cocom rivalry began centuries earlier with the fall of Mayap?nin the late fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century it reached a boil?ing point when the elite family members of the Xiu lineage embarkedon a pilgrimage to the tz'onot (cenote) of Chichen Itza to petition deitiesfor an assured rainfall by offering human sacrifices. The overlandtravel between Mani and Chichen Itza required the Xiu to passthrough Cocom territory, for which they were granted permission. In

Bishop Diego de Landa's account of the event, the Cocom gave theXiu "lodging all together in a large house, [and] set it on fire andkilled those who [tried to] escape." Landa, Landa's relaci?n de las cosasde Yucatan, trans, and ed. Alfred M. Tozzer (Cambridge, Mass.: Pea

body Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1941), 54-55.

4. John L. Stephens, Incidents ofTravel in Yucatan (Mexico City: Pan?orama, 2003), 270-73.

5. Ibid., 273.

6. The Mani Land Treaty Map and the rest of the "Xiu Chronicles" are cur?

rently housed in the Yucatan Collection of the Latin American Libraryat Tulane University, New Orleans, L497.2051/M278 RBC MARL

7. Although Stephens had the original Mani Land Treaty Map before him

during the transcription process, his resulting "Indian Map" is not afaithful reproduction. In addition to ignoring the city of Pustunich and

rerouting many of the depicted footpaths, Stephens reinterpreted thetoponymic symbol for the ancient site of Uxmal, representing the ruins

with a elevation view of the "Convento" architectural complex ratherthan an image of the structure's plan, which is used in the sixteenthcentury map.

8. While circular maps had fallen out of fashion in European courts fol?

lowing the publication of Ptolemy's Geography toward the end of thefifteenth century, the circle was widely used as a structuring form forearlier medieval mappae mundi, created inmonastic contexts. See David

Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi," in Cartography inPrehistoric, An?cient, and Medieval Europe and the editerranean, ed. J. B. Harley and

Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286.

9. I use the term "invention" self-consciously to highlight the fact that

prior to the Spanish colonization, the diverse cultures of Mesoamerica

did not possess a defined cartographic practice. This is not to say that

representations of space or territory were unknown to native pictorialtraditions. However, scholars have yet to find strong evidence of a dis?tinct cartographic practice whose sole purpose was the representationof regional space. For an alternative argument, specifically regardingthe existence of pre-Columbian urban plans, see Alessandra Russo, Elrealismo circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografia indigena Novo

hispana siglos xvi y xvii (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma deMexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 2005).

10. Throughout this paper I use J. Brian Harley's inclusive definition of

"map" as describing "refracted images of the socially-constructed world"(as opposed to impartial images of space) that therefore represent an"embedded social vision," embodying certain forms of power and au?

thority. Harley, The New Nature ofMaps: Essays in theHistory of Cartogra?phy, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,2001), 278.

11. "The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel" is presently housed inthe Princeton University Library, Garrett-Gates Mesoamerican Manu?

scripts, no. 4, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (here?after Garrett-Gates Mesoamerican Manuscripts).

12. During the Classic period (250-850 CE), three calendrical forms domi?nated public artworks and encompassed both the linear and cyclicaltemporal reckonings. Linear time was defined by the "Long Count," acalendar that utilized an effective 0 date corresponding to 3114 BCE inthe Gregorian calendar. From the start date, time expanded in a linearroute, although itwas organized by cycles of one-, twenty-, nd fourhundred-year counts and also larger cycles. Alternatively, the tzolk'incalendar was strictly cyclical, composed of an ever-repeating cycle oftwenty day names intersected with the numbers one through thirteen,and thus totaling 260 days. The ha 'ab calendar was correlated to theorbit of the earth around the sun and was thus composed of 365 dayssegmented into eighteen months of twenty days each, followed by a

five-day minimonth. The ha 'aband tzolk'in ran congruently to composethe calendar round, repeating the same day in both calendars everyfifty-two years. Robert J. Sharer, The Ancient Maya, 5th ed. (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1994), 560-70.

13. Ibid., 572.

14. For an overview of the historical development of this calendrical cycle,see Prudence M. Rice, Maya Calendar Origins: Monuments, Mythistory,and the aterialization of Time (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

15. Rice (ibid., 52) has recently pointed out the compositional similaritybetween the colonial Maya k'atun wheels and other motifs of pre-Co?lumbian artistic production, including the round petroglyphs carvedinto rock outcroppings surrounding Teotihuacan. For further discus?sion of similar circular carvings, see Clemency Coggins, "The Shape of

Time: Some Political Implications of a Four-Part Figure," American An?

tiquity 5, no. 4 (1980): 727-39; and Anthony F. Aveni, "Out of Teoti?huacan: Origins of the Celestial Canon inMesoamerica," inMesoamerica's Classic Heritage, from Teotihuacan to the ztecs, ed. David Carrasco,

Lindsay Jones, and Scott Sessions (Boulder: University Press of Colo?rado, 2000), 253-69.

16. Ralph L. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, 2nd ed. (Nor?man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 184; Karl A. Taube, "A Pre



15/16

MAYA CARTOGRAPHY IN EARLY COLONIAL YUCATAN 1?7

hispanic Maya Katun Wheel," Journal of Anthropological Research 44, no. 2(1988): 195-98; and Michel Antochiw, Historia cartografica de la Penin?sula de Yucatan (Campeche, Mex.: Centro de Investigation y de Estudios Avanzados del I.P.N., 1994), 38.

17. As argued by Matthew Restall and John F. Chuchiak IV, while pub?lished today as a singular text, Landa's Relacion is actually an "arbitrarycollection" of the Franciscan's writings, composed during his years in

Yucatan and Spain. The manuscript appears to be the product of threeor four compilers, all working after Landa's death in 1579. For a fullerdiscussion of this manuscript's history, see Restall and Chuchiak, "AReevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa's Relacion delas cosas de Yucatan" Ethnohistory 49, no. 3 (2002): 651-69.

18. "The Book of the Chilam Balam of Kaua" is in the Princeton UniversityLibrary, Garrett-Gates Mesoamerican Manuscripts, no. 6.

19. Taube, "A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel," 193-94. While the Mayap?n turtle clearly provides evidence for the pre-Columbian conceptual?ization of the katun as a circle, the embedding of directional associa?tions within the radial k'atun wheels produced after the Spanish

Conquest is a colonial invention, possibly derived from the influence ofEuropean wind compasses. See Victoria R. Bricker and Helga-MariaMiram, An Encounter of Two Worlds: The Book of Chilam Balam ofKaua

(New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 2002), 75.

20. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 273, also mentions a documentdated to 1556 that appears to be a record of an earlier land treaty.

21. While Spanish authorities can be said to have controlled the northwest?ern

portionof the

peninsulafrom

approximatelythe end of the six?

teenth century, the southeastern expanse remained largely uncon?trolled, to be incorporated only in the eighteenth century. See Grant

D. Jones, Anthropology and History in Yucatan (Austin: University Press ofTexas, 1977), xiv.

22. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, 178, claims that Yucatecagricultural techniques such as slash-and-burn farming resulted in a

scarcity of arable land, causing continual disputes over access and own?

ership.23. Matthew Restall, Maya Conquistador (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 225.

24. Ibid., 144. For further information on this important colonial actor, seeConstance Cortez, "Gaspar Antonio Chi and the Xiu Family Tree"(PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1995).

25. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, 179-80.

26. The copy made for the town of Yaxakumche is included in the"Cronica de Oxkutzcab," located in the Peabody Museum of Harvard

University, Cambridge, Mass. The Calotmul account was copied by JuanPio Perez and is incorporated into his Codice Perez, trans. Gustavo VegaIbarra, ed. Ralph Roys (Merida, Mex.: Ediciones de la Liga de Acci?nSocial, 1949).

27. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, 181, notes that in a1547 map of the Sotuta province, the Mani border lay farther to the

west, thus cutting into the Cocoms' "rightful" territory, causing Roys to

"suspect the Xiu of taking advantage of the favor they enjoyed with theSpaniards to encroach on the land of their neighbors to the east." Ihave utilized Roys's orthography throughout my analysis of the inva?sion tale and in the accompanying maps and appendix to avoid confu?sion. The modern spelling for each place-name follows Roys's whenknown.

28. Taube, "A Prehispanic Maya Katun Wheel," 198.

29. It is difficult to ascertain the exact production date of "The Book ofthe Chilam Balam of Chumayel," but some scholars have been able toreckon the relative dating by taking into account the inclusion of Euro?pean cosmological ideas. This is especially true for the earliest inclu?sions (those most important for this study), since they demonstrate aPtolemaic conception of the cosmos that was out-of-date in early-seven?teenth-century Europe. For example, see Gerardo Villalobos Aldana,"Oracular Science: Uncertainty in the History of Maya Astronomy"(PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001). The sections I examine from"The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel" fall into this categoryand thus record a pre-Columbian worldview despite the inclusion ofEuropean iconography. Moreover, some calendrical dates, such as thedate for summer solstice, "the longest day," is given as June 11 in the

Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar

during the Vatican's Gregorian reforms of 1582 in order to correct theincongruence between the lunar and liturgical year. Therefore, thesections of the "Chilam Balam" that utilize this calendar most likelypredate 1582. See A. D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europeand the on-Christian World (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 95.

30. Many scholars have addressed the motivations for the Franciscan or?der's New World evangelical campaign and its common strategies. For

example, see John L. Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the ranciscans ofthe ezv World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970);

Edwin Edward Sylvest, Motifs of Franciscan Mission Theory in Sixteenth

Century New Spain, Province of theHoly Gospel (Washington, D.C.: Acad?emy of American Franciscan History, 1975); and Lino Gomez Canedo,"Franciscans in the Americas: A Comprehensive View," in Franciscan

Presence in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Fran?ciscan History, 1983).

31. Victoria R. Bricker has discerned the presence of hieroglyphic spellingrules, what she calls the "last gasp of Maya hieroglyphic writing," insome colonial manuscripts, such as "The Book of the Chilam Balam of

Chumayel," deducing that they were copied directly from hieroglyphicsources. For further discussion of the relation between hieroglyphic

writing and its translation into the Latin alphabet, see Bricker, "TheLast Gasp of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in the Books of the ChilamBalam of Chumayel and Chan Can," in Word and Image inMaya Culture:Explorations in Language, Writing, and Representation, ed. W. F. Hanksand D. S. Rice (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), 39-50.

32. Although many such hybridized books existed in the early colonial pe?riod, perhaps one from each town, today books of the Chilam Balamare extant only in photographic records or in folio form from thetowns of Chumayel, Tizimin, Tusik, Ixil, Raua, Tekax, Chan Kan, Mani,and Nah. See Bricker and Miram, An Encounter of Two Worlds, 1. Oth?ers, such as those from Nabula, Tihosuco, Tixcocob, and Hocob?, areknown from references in early-twentieth-century literature but havebeen lost or hidden during the course of the century. See Ralph L.Roys, trans, and ed., The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Washington,D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933; reprint, Norman: University of Okla?homa Press, 1967), 6.

33. Themost

obvious insertion into the "Chilam Balam" is sections of theMoorish-Spanish tale of Doncella Teodor, originally a tale from TheArabian Nights. For a discussion of the tale's inclusion, see GordonBrotherston, Book of the ourth World: Reading the ative Americas throughTheir Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Marga?ret R. Parker, The Story of a Story across Cultures: The Case of the oncellaTeodor (London: Tamesis, 1996), 11-13, 28, 124; and Aldana, "OracularScience," 281-83.

34. Given the inclusion of a tale in the document with the date of 11Ahau, also shared by the Tizimin and Mani "Chilam Balams," Munro S.Edmonson concluded that a Maya scribe completed the manuscript inits final form between 1824 and 1837. See Edmonson, trans., Heaven

Born Merida and Its Destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Aus?tin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 1-2. Edmonson's history of thetext contrasts with Roys's, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 7, whoclaims that a Maya man, Juan Jose Hoil, compiled it from an unknownsource toward the end of the colonial period in 1782. According to

Roys, most of the manuscript iswritten in Hoil's hand, including hissignature and date. Thereafter, a few adaptations and additions were

incorporated into the document, as evidenced by a change in hand?writing. Hoil eventually gave the folios to his son, who became a Catho?

lic priest, and he in turn bequeathed them to Bishop Crescencio Carrillo yAncona during the 1860s.

35. In his investigation of how colonial Maya land grants elucidate pre-Co?lumbian worldviews, Restall, Maya Conquistador, 129, similarly acknowl?edges the "traces of Conquest-era perspectives while also reflecting thecultural impact of centuries of colonialism." Bricker and Miram, AnEncounter of Two Worlds, 1-88, take a similar approach in their analysisof Maya appropriation and perception of European scientific knowl?

edge in the early years of Spanish occupation.36. "The Chilam Balam of Chumayel," fols. 3r-6r. For a complete tran?

scription of the Mayan text and an accompanying English translation,see Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 16-19, 66-84.

37. The narrative structure can also be found in the Quiche Maya colonialtext, the Popol Vuh, and hieroglyphic inscriptions from various hiero?glyphic texts from Palenque, all of which record cosmogonic tales. SeeGerardo Aldana, The Apotheosis of anaab' Pakal: Science,History, and Reli?gion at ClassicMaya Palenque (Boulder: University Press of Colorado,2007), 151-57; and Amara L. Solari, "Maya Spatial Biographies in Com?

munal Memory and Cosmic Time: The Franciscan Evangelical Cam?

paign of Itzmal, Yucatan" (PhD diss., University of California, Santa

Barbara, 2007), 63-65.38. Numerous authors have analyzed the cultural and ideological impor?

tance of the east among the Yucatec Maya and itsmaterialization inconcrete artifacts such as architectural programs. See, for example,

Arthur Green Miller,"

'The Little Descent': Manifest Destiny from theEast," International Congress ofAmericanists 8 (1976); and idem, On theEdge of the ea: Mural Painting at Tancah-Tulum (Washington, D.C.:Dumbarton Oaks, 1982). For further information on directional signifi?cance in linguistic contexts of the contemporary Maya, seeWilliam

Hanks, Referential Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);and John M. Watanabe, "In theWorld of the Sun: A Cognitive Modelof Mayan Cosmology," Man 18, no. 4 (1983): 710-28.

39. "The Chilam Balam of Chumayel," fol. 3v, trans. Roys, The Book of Chi?lam Balam of Chumayel, 70.



16/16


40. "The Chilam Balam of Chumayel," fol. 4v, trans. Roys, The Book of Chi?lam Balam of Chumayel, 72.

41. "The Chilam Balam of Chumayel," fol. 5r, trans. Roys, The Book of Chi?lam Balam of Chumayel, 72.

42. I have also been able to provide translations for thirteen additional

place-namesthat are not associated with a

specificevent in the extant

version of "The Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel." I believethese narrative anecdotes have been lost in the past centuries; origi?nally, each town visited by the Itza was recalled with an associatedevent.

43. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 70. Alfredo Barrera

V?squez, Diccionario Maya Cordemex, ed. Juan Ramon Bastarrachea Manzano et al. (Merida, Mex.: Ediciones Cordemex, 1980), 698. The trans?lation in the Cordemex is "acrentarse o multiplicarse," to increase or

multiply oneself. Interestingly, a similar word in Mayan, p'olmal, is de?fined as "mercadear, tratar y contratar, comprar y vender" (to market,to contract, to buy and to sell). Given P'oole's role as an important

Maya trading and merchant town in the pre-Columbian era, due to its

strategic location on the peninsula's east coast, it is just as feasible thatthe provided anecdotal information could be glossed as "where the Itza

shopped/traded/bought/sold." Regardless, the relation between the

city's name and its related historical event remains the same: the placename records metonymically the associated anecdote.

44. V?squez, Diccionario Maya Cordemex, 7.

45. A. J. Garcia Zambrano, "Early Colonial Evidence of Pre-Columbian Rit?uals of Foundation," in Seventh

PalenqueRound Table, ed. M. G. Robert?

son and V. M. Fields (San Francisco: Pre-Columbian Art Research Insti?tute, 1994), 217-28.

46. For an alternative view of the symbolic importance assigned to the

Maya directions, primarily the notion that values are associated notwith the directions but instead with the spaces marked by the solsticesand equinox, see Franz Tichy, "Order and Relationship of Space andTime in Mesoamerica: Myth or Reality?" inMesoamerican Sites and WorldViews, ed. E. P. Benson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research

Library and Collections, 1981), 217-45.

47. Michel M. Davoust has posited an alternative reading of this narrativedivision. He argues that this tale, rather than representing a "primor?dial" and "historical" section of human chronology, recalls two distinctinvasions of the Itza, the first occurring in the ninth century and thesecond in the twelfth. See Davoust, "Les migrations des Itzas et de Hunac Ceel dans le Chilam Balam de Chumayel et la geographie politique du nord Yucatan classique et postclassique," Mayab 15 (2002):61-78.

48. The exception to this structural distinction is Uxmal, which is men?tioned in the first section of this invasion. However, given the antago?nistic history between the Xiu and Cocom lineages during the aban?donment of Uxmal, it is understandable why the Chumayel narratorwould want to downplay the cultural importance of Uxmal by relegat?ing it to a peripheral position within the creation story. For an over?view of Xiu-Cocom interaction, see Frans Blom, The Conquest of Yucatan(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), 81-85.

49. Restall, Maya Conquistador, 144. The Franciscans took Gaspar AntonioChi away from his family at a young age and reared him in the monas?tic schools, teaching him to read and write in both Spanish and Latin.

By 1561 Chi was working closely with Landa, especially as an inter?

preter and court scribe during the Mani auto-da-fe of 1562 and, follow?

ing Landa's removal from the province, for the bishop of Yucatan,Friar Francisco de Toral. Undoubtedly, Chi provided much of the eth?

nographic material for Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan and wasthe author of many submissions to Philip II's Relaciones geogr?ficas

project.50. In her discussion of central Mexican maps, Dana Leibsohn has argued

that the substitution of indigenous toponyms by generic church glyphsperforms an "ideological function" in that the newly adopted toponym"indexes the Christianization of conquered lands." Leibsohn, "Colonyand Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain," in

Reframing the enaissance, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1995), 273.

51. Walter D. Mignolo, "Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses andTerritorial Representations: Toward a Diatopical Understanding of Co?lonial Semiosis," Dispositio 14 (1991): 162.

52. Richard Kagan, Urban Images of theHispanic World, 1493-1793 (New Ha?ven: Yale University Press, 2000), 16.

53. Ibid.

54. As previously mentioned, Stephens's transcription of The Mani Land

Treaty Map significantly altered Uxmal's toponym, transforming it froman aerial view to an elevation.

55. In his examination of early colonial land bills of sale and bequests,Matthew Restall has found that as a means to chart property holdings,

indigenous people processed around the territory's boundary in a for?mulaic manner, and in 98 percent of the cases they respected a squareor rounded route that circumambulated the space. As groups walkedthe boundaries, they named the cardinal directions, prompting a visual

image, a mental map that corresponds to the preconquest quincunxpattern. Restall thus surmises that this formulaic pattern suggests a ritu?alized event that recollects the original settlement of the land. See Re?stall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1997), 194-200.

56. For a fuller discussion of itinerary maps and their experiential visual

language, see Ricardo Padron, "Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography,Space, and Hispanic Modernity," Representations 79 (2002): 36-42.

57. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, 186-87. For a transla?tion of the entire text, see 185-90.

58. The extant Map of Sotuta is likely a transcription of a document createdin 1545 at the bequest of Nachi Cocom, leader of the Cocom lineage,

when he ordered a survey of his territorial holdings. A period descrip?tion of this event is recorded in the "C?dice Perez," but, as in Pio

Perez's transcription of the Mani Land Treaty, he did not include a

rendering of the Sotuta map. However, the textual description of theevent appears to mirror the structure of the Mani Land Treaty process

whereby participants proceeded throughout peripheral towns and fi?

nally returned to settlements under the domain of the Cocom lineage.Although an examination of this event is outside the scope of the

present study, it appears that this indigenous examination of space also

replicated and mirrored localized understandings of cosmogenesis. Forthe textual account, see Juan Pio Perez, Codice Perez, trans. Gustavo

Vega Ibarra, ed. Ralph L. Roys (Merida, Mex.: Ediciones de la Liga deAccion Social, 1949), 358-64.

59. The extant Map ofAcanceh is a 1763 copy of the town's account of the1557 Mani Land Treaty. TheMap of Tabasco was created as a responseto Philip IFs geographic queries. In 1575, Philip II and his royal cos

mographer, Juan Lopez de Velasco, devised a fifty-point questionnairerequiring all colonial administrators of Spain's American territories tofurnish detailed information about local ecology, history, and culture.Three of these questions requested maps, specifically, a civic plan, acoastal map, and another describing offshore islands. However, given

the lack of Spanish and Creole settlers trained in modern cartography,few of the responses included maps, and most of those that did werecommissions from indigenous artists. The resulting documents provideinvaluable insight to scholars for the view they lend into the transfor?

mative and conflictual domain of intercultural encounters in the earlycolonial period. See Barbara E. Mundy, TheMapping of New Spain: In?

digenous Cartography and theMaps of the "Relaciones Geogr?ficas" (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996).

60. Barbara E. Mundy has made a similar argument for the circular Nurem?

berg ap that accompanied Hern?n Cortes's "Second Letter" toCharles V. While the document clearly utilized European visual tropes,Mundy argues that it is based on an indigenous source, as its structur?

ing form and other iconographic elements actually "yield a glimpse ofthe ideological conception of the imperial capital" possible only by anative maker. For a fuller discussion, see Mundy, "Mapping the Aztec

Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and

Meanings," Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 11-33, at 13.

61. In addition to the round maps submitted as part of the Relaciones, an?other round map is also extant from Oaxaca, the Lienzo deficay?n. Fora discussion of the place signs used in this cartograph, see Mary Eliza?

beth Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec PlaceSigns and Maps (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 55-60,66-67, 148-61.

62. For a fuller discussion of the circular maps from Oaxaca, see Mundy,TheMapping ofNew Spain, 112-17.

the invention of maya cartography in early colonial yucatán.pdf

Documents