Notes

1 Garibay 1965, 14-16, 108; Markman and Markman 1992, 212-213; Matos Moctezuma 1997.

2 See John Monaghan’s commentary in the Scholars section of Mesolore, as well as Monaghan 1990.

3 Broda 1978.

4 Lockhart 1992, 14-58.

5 Lockhart 1992, 18-20, 68; Smith 2003, 172-191.

6 Lockhart 1992, 20-28.

7 Gibson 1952, 1-16, 89-122.

8 Restall et al. 2005, 73.

9 There are, of course, some exceptions to European non-interference, but even these point to the resiliency of the altepetl as a unit; Lockhart 1992, 28-35.

10 Lockhart 1992: 57-58.

11 Political forms very similar to the altepetl existed outside of Central Mexico: the ñuu in the Mixteca, and the cah in the Yucatan; Restall et al 2005.

12 One example from Central Mexico is Mary Hodge’s correlation of colonial maps from Coatepec with archeological survey data from the same region; Hodge 1994, 47-52.

13 Lacadena 2008a, 6.

14 Sixteenth-century spelling was very flexible, the ç and z and tz sounds could all be written using the same characters. The town name spelling Huiçillapan in one document might be spelled Huitzillapan in another. For more information, see the User’s Guide to the Additional Documents section of Mesolore’s archive, as well as the introductory tutorials to “The Alvarado Vocabulary” and “The Molina Vocabulary.”

15 Why Nahuatl writing used such extensive abbreviation is unclear. Lacadena (2008, 14) includes this as one of the three features that distinguish the Nahuatl writing system from other logosyllabic systems such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Linear B, and Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphs.

16 Lacadena 2008a, 9.

17 On the standard phonetic structure of logograms, see Lacadena 2008a, 6: “the reading value of a logogram is that of the word which it represents in composition” —and he continues in footnote 10 on the same page— “For example, SIWA, “woman,” not *SIWATL; AKA, “reed,” not *AKATL; SITLAL “star,” not *SITLALIN.” For good introductory dictionaries of Nahuatl that includes vowel lengths and indicates the stems of nouns, see Karttunen 1992 and Lockhart 2001, 210-243. The entry for tenam-itl, wall, is found on Lockhart 2001, 233.

18 Lacadena 2008b, 40.

19 Lacadena 2008a, 7.

20 Lacadena 2008a, 11.

21 Lacadena 2008a, 6.

22 Lacadena 2008a, 6. On the dreadlocks worn by indigenous priests, see Motolinía 1951 [1538-1541]: 99, n. 3, and 120.

23 This generic use of hill signs, in which they indicate a place in general and not a hill-place specifically, is discussed by Elizabeth Hill Boone: “The hill element is by far the most common. It can actually refer to a hill, but it often simply serves as the foundation on which identifying elements are put” (Boone 2000, 49).

24 Boone 2000, 53; cf. Lockhart 1992, 15, 577 n. 6.

25 For a discussion of this map, and of the Relaciones Geográficas in general, see Mundy 1996, 135-138 and plate 7.

26 Christian 1981, 1-22.

27 Leibsohn 1995, 1996. Transcripts of nearly a hundred such boundary documents from Oaxaca, spanning the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, are included in the “Ñudzavui Geographies” section of Mesolore’s Archive.

28 Acuña 1985, 33:“A la octava [pregunta] se responde que los pueblos con quien se parte [términos] es Tecapatepeque, por un cabo que cae a do[nde] sale el sol, [a] dos leguas de aqui…”

29 For example, we know that an actual Hill of the Serpent gave its name to the altepetl of Coatepec (coatl is Nahuatl for snake; see Hodge 1994). This was an important sacred location (Acuña 1985, 132-133). According to their histories, the ancient ancestors of the people of Coatepec decided to settle in Coatepec because they saw a large white snake on top of the Hill of the Serpent.

30 Mundy 1996, 137.

31 Berdan and Anawalt 1992, vol. 3, folio 27r.

32 On the ground, Tecpatepec is due east of Misquiahuala, while Atenco is to the southwest of Misquiahuala; Berdan and Anawalt 1992, vol. 2, 50.

33 Dana Leibsohn has recently argued that this kind of “strategic visual archaism” was also used by the arists of the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca (Leibsohn 2009: 148).

34 On Alvarado and the conquest of Guatemala, see Kramer 1994 and Asselbergs 2004.

35 König 1993; Yannakakis 2008, 192-218.

36 As David Lupher has argued (2003), many Europeans described their own exploits in the New World as deeds which surpassed the actions of the heroes of Antiquity.

37 By the middle of the sixteenth century, a number of indigenous people in Mesoamerica knew Latin, and were well-versed in the iconographic traditions of Europe; see Osorio Romero 1990; Gruzinski 2002; Hamann 2010.