Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (review)

The Mapa de Cuauhtinchan is one of a number of sixteenth-century pictorial manuscripts to have become the focus of significant scholarly attention in recent years. Although the manuscript map has been known for many decades, in 2001 it was purchased by Ángeles Espinosa Yglesias. He provided access to a team of scholars who developed the studies in this collection. This book is the result of numerous meetings in Mexico and the United States where the scholars studied the manuscript and then approached it from their several disciplinary backgrounds. It is a massive and richly illustrated work that provides a model for the collective study of important early colonial pictorial manuscripts.

This work is divided into three large sections. The first deals with the orientation of the work in time and space. Elizabeth Boone provides an overview to the story being told in the manuscript, describing the glyphic conventions, the great arc of the narrative, and the interaction of geography and history in the work. Marina Straulino gives a fascinating description of how her work as the conservator of the map allowed her access to a deeper understanding, especially of its physical composition, pigments, and eventual repair and stabilization. Ann Seiferle-Valencia looks at the overall impact of the work and how individual narrative units interact, as the point of view shifts from modular unit to modular unit, to create a synthesis of history and geography. In the fourth chapter, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano studies the historical context of the map, particularly the nobility of Cuauhtinchan. She concludes that it served to ratify the historical identity of the altepetl. Florine G. L. Asselbergs argues that the map, while clearly a colonial document, represents a pre-Columbian narrative. On the same page, figures from several different centuries are juxtaposed to show both an interaction and a cultural inheritance. In the last chapter of the section, Anthony Aveni studies the relationship between calendrical signs in the map and native cosmology.

The second section looks at the use of roads on the document and in the narrative depicted in the document. Keiko Yoneda provides an overview of previous interpretations of the manuscript and, in her own close reading, determines that it was created to emphasize the cultural identity of members of the community, conveying this and other political messages to outsiders. Eleanor Wake sees the work as representing both Mixteca and Nahua conventions, along with some European influence, to provide an official history of Nahua Cuauhtinchan. Ethnobotanists Robert Bye and Edelmira Linares analyze the great variety of plants depicted in the manuscript. In the last chapter of the section, Guilhem Olivier studies the representation of the New Fire ceremony and sacred bundles to see the close relationship between the community, its deities, and ritual.

The last section broadens the focus with comparisons from beyond colonial Mexico to help elucidate meaning from the map. Vincent James Stanzione compares the narratives of the map to his experience living and studying among the Maya, seeing pilgrimage as a central device or trope of the map, and creates a modern narrative to accompany the map. Jace and Laura Adams Weaver continue this thread, relating the important themes of pilgrimage and migration to other native peoples of North America. Osvaldo García-Goyco uses comparative ethnography to look at symbols in the map in the context of other native groups of the Americas. Dana Liebsohn changes the perspective once again and invites the reader to join in the action of the map and become more deeply engaged in seeing the details of the work, taking the reader from the pre-Columbian context to the modern world in seeing the text of the map in its varied contexts. Lastly, the volume editors conclude that the single history depicted in the map consists of two...