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When Two Worlds Collide: Amerindian Mapping and the Spanish Conquest of the Americas
From: University of Chicago
| By:
Barbara Mundy |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 When the Spanish first came to the New World, conquistadors used native maps to explore and exploit Amerindian resources and people. The European appetite for information about the New World was voracious--wildly fictitious maps of the Americas were disseminated throughout Europe--yet the colonizers overlooked a number of indigenous forms of mapping and recording data. In an essay adapted from her lecture at the Maps, Identity and World Studies workshop at the University of Chicago, Barbara Mundy describes how European concepts of "map" and "mapping" embraced only products from the classical cartographic tradition and ignored such valuable native forms as the lienzo and the intricately knotted quipu. |
 he clash between the Spanish conquistadors and their Amerindian opponents was played out in maps, as well as on the ground. The battles of conquest raged in the 1520s and 1530s in Mesoamerica (Mexico and Guatemala) and the Andes (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador). And while most key cities and peoples were controlled by Spanish troops by the 1540s, the Spanish struggled throughout the century to establish enduring rule. The trajectory of one strand of native mapping follows the contours of this history. During the early years of conquest, Spaniards commissioned or used native maps for exploration or maneuvers. Later on, native maps were put to bureaucratic uses. Many were used in court cases, some of them for grants of land, and others to establish or protect native landholdings. |
 Of course, this is the history of native mapping seen from the perspective of the conquerors, who initially took note of the maps that benefited them, and then encouraged the development of maps that they could use. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés offered the first mention of Amerindian maps, as he wrote about maps given to him by the doomed Aztec emperor Motecuzoma. Later, Cortés used native maps in his disastrous campaign of exploration and conquest as he moved south overland into Guatemala. Later still, the capable Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who was sent by the crown to establish an ordered government from the chaos of early colonial rule, encouraged the production of native maps (pinturas, he called them) to help in the land granting process. However, there are few, if any, accounts of native maps from the Andes, and we could write off this historical absence as the fault of the Spanish conquerors in the region, whose single-minded brutality prevented them from noticing. |
Or the lack of mention could have another cause. The conquistadors, products of sixteenth-century Europe, would likely have identified as maps the things that fit their conception of "map." The historical record narrows the field even further: The Spanish took note of the maps that were useful to them. So are they the most complete evaluators of native maps? Their intellectual predicament foreshadows the one scholars would face four centuries later. Are the concepts of "map" and "mapping" developed by scholars of maps from Europe and the classical world, suited only to embrace and anticipate products from that tradition? |
 In 1987, when David Woodward and Brian Harley published the first of the many-volumed History of Cartography, they attempted to forge a definition of the term "map" that would transcend cultural limitations. They wrote, "Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world." If we pair this inclusive understanding with the extant corpus of graphic work from the prehispanic and sixteenth-century New World, we can develop a reasonable idea of maps from Mesoamerica. But the example of the Andes holds out the possibility that the 1987 definition doesn't go far enough. |
 Prehispanic Andean societies never, as far as we know, saw fit to develop records written on paper or another flat surface. Instead, the Inka, who ruled most of the Andes at the time of the conquest, kept track of matters with quipu, elaborate systems of knotted cords. The decipherment of the quipu was a specialized enough task to be assigned to the quipucamayac, professionally trained readers of the quipu. So we are compelled to ask: Did the quipu also encode space? Do their knotted strings hold out a tantalizing prospect for expanding the definition of map beyond a written surface? One prominent quipu scholar, Gary Urton, argues for whole histories being contained on quipus, and there may be no reason why the quipu could not have also contained maps. But since decipherment of the extant quipus is still in its nascent stages, we will have to wait to better understand quipus before we can reconsider the definition of the map. |
 We have a firmer understanding from Mesoamerica. Both the recognition of the Spaniards and the existing corpus show us the parameters of maps. At the time of conquest, the ethnic groups in this region (Nahuas [who are more commonly known as Aztecs], Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and others) used a writing system that mixed pictures with logographs (symbols standing for words), and this lent itself easily to the spatial and pictorial demands of maps. The maps that Mesoamericans made ranged from cosmic maps, showing the layout of the four quadrants of the earth, to maps of local geography. Common to Mesoamerican maps is the overlay of an historical account or of social arrangements onto the depiction of territory, and this phenomenon continued under Spanish rule. One of the Relaciones Geográficas from the Mixtec-speaking town of Teozacoalco shows the
 genealogical history of the town's ruling family running to the left of the circular map of territory, and continuing within it. While we have many maps from the sixteenth century, what is lost to us are the important oral component of maps, given that oral recounts from a trusted speaker were more authoritative than written records in both Mesoamerica and the Andes. |
In the years following the conquest, Amerindians in the newly founded colonies of New Spain and Peru learned to use maps as a tool in their struggle to maintain their rights and privileges. They worked against formidable odds. The greatest was the nature of the colonies themselves, which were run to generate profits for the Spanish crown, not for the material well-being of their inhabitants. In New Spain, indigenous mapmakers produced hundreds of maps for court cases to document native landholdings. In the initial years after conquest, these maps used indigenous symbol systems and mensuration, but as it was increasingly by a Spanish audience and court system that these native maps were used, they followed suit, relying more heavily on Spanish writing to carry the meaning of the map. |
 Indigenous communities also produced maps for their own use. These documented community landholdings and histories. Because many were painted on sheets of cloth, they are called by the Spanish word for canvas, lienzo. A typical lienzo concentrates on a single community, and shows the elements that set that community off from others: A set of named boundaries (often pictographs) runs along the edges of the sheet and some kind of history, or genealogy of the ruling family, is recounted within the space of this territory. Dozens, if not hundreds, of sixteenth-century lienzos were still community-held in the nineteenth century, and a few still are today. |
On the other side of the Atlantic, the developments--even the contribution of Amerindian maps--went largely unheeded in sixteenth-century Europe. Instead, the Spanish crown used maps and charts made by its own. From the vantage point of the empire, which enriched itself with New World goods, the crucial maps were mariners' charts. Particularly precious were maps of the Caribbean, where the fleet containing Mexican and Peruvian silver set sail. All mariners' charts were, in theory, tightly held by the Casa de Contratación in Seville, which controlled trade. But the scores of pirates and buccaneers making their living on these waters must have been able to capture or fabricate maps themselves. |
In the public arena, where maps were widely consumed by the literate "armchair travelers" of Europe, it was largely fantastic maps of the New World that reigned. These were often drawn from early maps sent back by the conquistadors, like one of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan sent with a letter of Hernán Cortés, or constructed whole cloth out of the written descriptions of the conquistadors. These images were recycled for decades. If we use Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's wildly popular atlas of city maps, Civitates Orbis Terrarum as a measure, its map of Tenochtitlan, which appears in the 1576, 1581-2, and 1612 editions, was drawn from a map of the Aztec city published in 1524. It thus enshrined a city that by the time of publication had been razed. |
 But we should not dismiss these European maps only as outmoded fabrications, for they were powerful instruments of knowledge, which put into pictorial forms how Europe envisioned the New World. The publication of Claudius Ptolemy's Geography in 1475, which set maps within the text written by this second-century Alexandrine author, made this marriage of map and text seem to come down from classical world. Given the widespread admiration for ancient knowledge and models, this union of map and text was widely copied, and served as a model for Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates. |
The emphasis that European maps put on the difference of New World peoples--the ones of Tenochtitlan often emphasize sacrificial practices (the Cortés map has a decapitated figure at its center)--would help promote the negative view of "barbaric" Amerindians that generations of Europeans held. In addition, the veil of secrecy that Spain drew over her colonies right after the conquest meant that other Europeans were left to embellish the scarce sources that they had. So the European myths about Amerindians that had been so quickly established, and then widely disseminated, proved to be enduring. |
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