Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader

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Mapping Latin America

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

FRANCISCO ESTRADA-BELLI AND HEATHER HURST

A map is generally made to show a known place and its spatial relationship to distant and less familiar places. A portable map can help the traveler on the move; larger maps may be hung on a wall for reference and display. In addition to its content, the context in which a map was used can reveal important details about who made and who viewed it. In 2003, the Holmul Archaeological Project discovered a map painted on the wall of an ancient Maya palace (figs. 1.1 and 1.2). The mural-map, which decorated Room 1 of the La Sufricaya royal residence, dates to the end of the fourth century. As perhaps one of the oldest surviving maps in Latin America, the La Sufricaya mural presents an indigenous conceptualization of the Maya world from an era studied primarily through archaeological investigations with limited written texts. With this early map, the most straightforward questions need to be answered: What places are represented? How are spatial relationships depicted? Why is it painted in the palace? Who is the map's intended audience?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to begin with what we know about the time period when the map was painted, around AD 400. The Maya in what is today Guatemala and southeastern Mexico, and Teotihuacán, 1,000 kilometers to the west, in today's central Mexico, enjoyed a little-understood cultural connection. In the late fourth century, the population of the Maya area was growing. Maya polities, from small villages to urban centers, dotted the rich tropical forests of the lowlands and were intertwined in a complex network of economic, political, and ideological relations. Divine kings ruled large Maya centers, such as Tikal, Calakmul, and Piedras Negras, and promoted their lineages with hereditary and divine dynastic criteria. Growth, increasing social stratification, and broad political interaction created a climate of local competition and shifting political alliances in the late fourth century that steadily increased over the next five hundred years.

To the west, Teotihuacán was rising to its apogee in the centuries leading to AD 400. The distinctly organized Teotihuacán culture was centered at a massive city in the volcanic highlands of central Mexico. Tens of thousands of people inhabited apartment compounds arranged on a grid surrounding huge pyramids at the city's core. This urban superpower had a profound effect on the Maya area. While the nature of the relationship between Teotihuacán and polities in the Maya area is still debated, a notable increase in central Mexican-style cultural material and textual references in hieroglyphic inscriptions at Maya sites dating to this period suggests intensified extralocal political interaction. The representation of people and places in the La Sufricaya mural provides clues to aspects of the relationship between the Maya and Teotihuacán spheres.

The La Sufricaya palace is located within the Holmul polity in the Maya heartland, today's Petén region of Guatemala. Just before AD 400, artists painted murals in Room 1 showing Teotihuacán and Maya worlds coming together. On three walls (west, north, and east), murals depict Maya and Teotihuacán individuals arranged in horizontal registers and vertical columns: rows of seated central Mexican warriors hold shields and darts, and lines of standing Maya elite wear folded cloth headdresses and jaguar pelt skirts, and some figures also hold shields. Among the rows of hundreds of figures, one painted section is unlike all the rest. Mural 6N, in the northwest corner of Room 1, depicts two buildings, one above and one below, connected by a road marked by footprints leading away from both buildings and meeting behind a group of four figures (fig. 1.1). All the murals in Room 1 are unusual, because they show many Maya and Teotihuacán figures together; we believe Mural 6N is unique, because it is a cartographic representation of the Maya-Teotihuacán relationship.

Maps typically deploy symbols to represent places—for example, a church standing for a town on colonial maps, or a star on a contemporary map to identify a capital. The La Sufricaya map shows two places an unknown distance apart, each represented by a temple and connected by a road. Looking at differences in the buildings, we can begin to decipher what places may be represented. Above is a temple with red and white decoration on its terraces, and below is a temple with a beautiful thatch roof. The upper temple utilizes panels in front of sloping terraces, suggesting a nonlocal architectural style (perhaps representing a modified Teotihuacán talud-tablero). The lower temple is shown using common Maya-style construction of its platform and roof. Although no place-names label the temples, the details suggest that the place shown at the top of the map is foreign, possibly even Teotihuacán, and the lower location is a local Maya polity, probably La Sufricaya itself.

Unlike most maps today, indigenous Mesoamerican maps combined people and events with representations of places to map history as well as space (for well-known examples, see maps made in the sixteenth century for the Relaciones Geográficas in chap. 7). The La Sufricaya map is a very early example of this indigenous Mesoamerican cartographic tradition. Several people, both human and supernatural, appear in the La Sufricaya map in the temples and on the path. The figures inside the temples appear to be gods, priests or rulers in the form of their patron deity, K'awiil. In the center panel, two men with two supernaturals perform a ceremony along the path in proximity to the lower temple. The surviving details of the events and actors of the La Sufricaya map seem to record a journey made between two temples, with rituals performed or a supernatural experience en route. Footprints suggest travel occurred from the lower temple (possibly La Sufri caya) to the upper temple (possibly Teotihuacán) and back.

The map's style provides clues about who made the map, and the intended audience. The three men making the journey between temples are all Maya. The two supernaturals (in dark brown with zoomorphic heads) also have Maya characteristics. Although the map has mostly Maya figures, seated Teotihuacán warriors dominate the adjacent walls. The warriors are painted in true Teotihuacán style, and yet Maya representational conventions are also painted with stylistic fluency. The map and its adjoining murals combine Teotihuacán and Maya iconography and painting styles in a unique hybrid. The stylistic evidence suggests the murals of Room 1 are a true product of cultural interchange created by artists who had traveled and trained widely. The murals are located in an open hall in the palace. The audience visiting the palace hall likely included elite Maya from the surrounding area for political, economic, and religious functions, such as paying tribute or arranging a marriage, and nonlocal merchants and dignitaries.

What we can learn from the images seems substantial. However, there may be more to the story that we cannot know. Badly eroded paint to the left of the road hints at details now lost, and the remains of possible glyphs, which might identify individuals in the map, are poorly preserved above the central figures (fig. 1.2). The lower half of the wall is completely eroded. For further interpretation of the places, people and events represented in the map, we must turn to artifacts found in the palace's other rooms.

Many maps in this volume are better understood with their accompanying historical documents. Similarly, hieroglyphic texts found in the palace help us "read" the La Sufricaya map. Nearby Mural 7 (Room 10), is a text painted on the wall celebrating the dedication of a temple (likely the palace itself) in AD 379. The text notes the celebration occurred on the one-year anniversary of the arrival (entrada) of the personage Sihyaj K'ahk' from Teotihuacán in the neighboring Maya city of Tikal. The entrada of Sihyaj K'ahk' is a historical event of major importance in the Guatemalan lowlands. From other texts, we know that coincident with his arrival on January 16, 378, Tikal's ruler died and shortly thereafter a new dynasty celebrating central Mexican lineage was enthroned under King Yax Nuun Ahiin I. After these events, select Maya sites established new dynastic lines with central Mexican connections, and the elite class at several Maya lowland sites began using central Mexican imagery and objects in their palaces, tombs, and temples.

The best interpretation of the map's content is drawn from the combination of archaeological data, epigraphic history, and the images themselves. The map painted within Room 1 likely served a purpose similar to that of the text in Room 10: to establish a new political order aligned with Teotihuacán's new presence at nearby Tikal. The text honors the "arrival" of foreigners by naming foreign and local leaders and celebrating the event's anniversary. Using images, the map shows broad participation in foreign-local interaction, with local elite traveling to a foreign place with ritual practice perhaps witnessed by a large "international" attendance. Interestingly, the costumes of both Maya and Teotihuacán figures on adjoining walls emphasize militaristic roles, yet peaceful events are depicted. Inscriptions from Tikal and Copán link the accessions of Maya rulers who claimed connections with Teotihuacán through rituals conducted at a specific place, wi'te'naah, to which they needed to travel before their accession. One important clue to how this may have worked is the tenth-to thirteenth-century Quichéan kings' custom of traveling to a city of greater learning, Tollan, to acquire the royal insignia prior to their accession to power. This mural could represent such a journey. During a period of alliance with Tikal in the late fourth through early fifth century, artists painted Room 1 with a map and murals to show that the leadership of La Sufricaya participated in legitimization of authority through rituals at Teotihuacán, as the leadership of Tikal, Copán, and probably other Maya sites did as well.

Mural 6N combines a map with historical figures and events. When taken in context with the other murals within Room 1 and nearby textual information, the cartographic representation of La Sufricaya is similar to map traditions from twelve hundred years later in central Mexico. For example, by including figures and footprints, the La Sufricaya map illustrates history as well as geography. In this way, the fourth-century Maya map shares many conventions with and uses a format similar to sixteenth-century lienzo painting. Lienzos, as cartographic histories, combine temporal events with a map of places to record migrations, foundation events, and community histories. Early colonial maps by indigenous artists were made to defend landholdings and hereditary titles in response to Spanish land seizures (see chaps. 7 and 8). These maps demonstrate syncretism in their graphic conventions and concepts of "community." Similarly, the fourth-century map painted at La Sufricaya blended and adapted graphic styles (Maya and Teotihuacán) to represent a new concept of place (the La Sufricaya palace and ceremonial center) in relation to a newly defined "other" (the arrival of Sihyaj K'ahk' in Tikal from Teotihuacán). Cartographic history painting was used to establish the redefined community of La Sufricaya as it related to a backdrop of social-political change. While our understanding of the historic details is still unclear, the fourth-century map from La Sufricaya is a remarkable precursor in a long tradition of PreColumbian cartography.

Chapter Two

JOHN HÉBERT

Information gathered on Christopher Columbus's voyages led many in Europe (if not Columbus himself ) to recognize the existence of a previously unknown continent. Cartographic representations and naming of this continent, part of a new understanding of the world, soon followed, incorporating updated information as it arrived. Those interested in publishing new maps, however, tended not to be the monarchs financing exploration and well-guarded geographic knowledge (see chap. 3). In 1507 a group of scholars in St. Dié, in the Kingdom of Lorraine, prepared a large world map in twelve sheets, and their remarkable map provided the first clear depiction of North and South America: its shape, size, and geographic relationship to the rest of the known world. Equally important, the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller and his colleagues decided to name the Western Hemisphere America, in honor of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, for which the map is famous to this day.

Why "America"? As the full title suggests, Waldseemüller, in a remote part of northeast France, was using Vespucci's travel notes as a source: Universalis cosmographia secunda Ptholemei traditionem et Americi Vespucci aliorum que lustrationes (A drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others). While recognizing Columbus's voyages, Waldseemüller and his group also had acquired a recent French translation of Vespucci's letter detailing his purported four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to America between 1497 and 1504. In that work, Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (Letter of Amerigo Vespucci concerning the islands newly discovered on his four voyages), Vespucci concluded that the lands reached by Columbus in 1492, and explored by Columbus and others over the ensuing two decades, were indeed a segment of a new continent. Because of Vespucci's recognition of that startling revelation, it is likely that he was honored with the use of his name for the newly discovered continent.

The 1507 Waldseemüller world map provided more than a name for the new continent; it represented a radical departure in European understanding of the relationship of landmasses in the world, a change not embraced rapidly in Europe. The map was a starting point for the process by which European ideas and understandings of the shape of the earth subsequently were tested. The results rendered obsolete the model established by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, which had been confined to the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. While this essay focuses on America, the map itself was intended to provide people in Europe with a sense of their geographic relationship to the rest of the world. In that same measure, then, America is placed in the European firmament. The center of the map is Europe and the Mediterranean world, with the rest of the world radiating from and drawn to that center (fig. 2.1). Europe takes visual possession of America and Africa south of the equator through the map and through the symbols on the map. For sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, only European symbols of authority, and for that matter only those of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, appear. Notably, in Asia, where Europeans had entered into trade relations with native peoples as equals, these symbols do not appear on Waldseemüller's map.

Based on a compilation of information from various sources, primarily Spanish and Portuguese, Waldseemüller and his fellow researchers at the Gymnasium Vosagense, in St. Dié, had been involved in preparing an updated version of the famous Ptolemy atlas during 1505–1507. Their intention was to produce an atlas that included Ptolemy's old maps of the world and to add new information obtained from European expeditions to America and around the horn of Africa, led primarily by the Spanish and the Portuguese from the mid-fifteenth century. Their map used the piecemeal information remarkably well. Before we might expect to see such accuracy, Waldseemüller's map correctly depicted the hemisphere surrounded by two oceans, later named the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and showed land extending from near the southern tip of South America to the top of North America. As we view the map, we can recognize the world as we know it today. For example, we see a fairly accurate depiction of the shape and dimensions of South America, with its width at the equator within seventy miles of its actual longitudinal breadth.

In view of this portrayal, it seems probable that European exploration of the west coast of South America occurred earlier than has been recorded in history, or that Europeans obtained cartographic information from native sources, a possibility that present scholarship considers unlikely. Knowledge of the true shape of the Western Hemisphere was not confirmed, at least in historical accounts, until later in the sixteenth century. So, how did the mapmaker come to his startling conclusion? The answer to that question will only surface as more effort is placed on discovering the sources used to create the map and their movement through Europe from their logical bases in Spain and Portugal to the Rhine River region where the map was prepared. Nonetheless, the gradual understanding that a large landmass separated Europe from Asia, that is, America, began to gain traction in Europe, and as the 1507 map clearly indicates, that landmass is great in size and distinctly separated from the rest of Europe's understanding of the "known" world.

(Continues...)

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