This article balances current understandings of the political landscape of Postclassic Mesoamerica through a conjunctive analysis of the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Mixtec Empire of Tututepec in the lower Río Verde region of Oaxaca. Tututepec has long been known from ethnohistoric sources as a powerful Late Postclassic imperial center. Until recently, however, little has been known of the archaeology of the site. We discuss the founding, extent, chronology, and aspects of the internal organization and external relations of Tututepec based on the results of a regional survey, excavations, and a reanalysis of ethnohistoric documents. Tututepec was founded early in the Late Postclassic period when the region was vulnerable to conquest due to political fragmentation and unrest. Indigenous historical data from three Mixtec codices narrate the founding of Tututepec as part of the heroic history of Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw.” According to these texts, Lord 8 Deer founded Tututepec through a creative combination of traditional Mixtec foundation rites and a strategic alliance with a highland group linked to the Tolteca-Chichimeca. Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence indicate that Tututepec continued to expand through the Late Postclassic, growing to 21.85 km2, and at its peak was the capital of an empire extending over 25,000 km2.
The pages of the Mixtec screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful have been linked to specific locations on the ground. In this essay, I propose identifications for seven place signs which appear on pages 4 to 1 of the Codex Vienna and page 3 of the Codex Nuttall. I draw on five types of sources: testimonies from the 1544–1547 Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation, the pictorial records of the Mixtec screenfolds themselves, the findings from a FAMSI-funded study of colonial and independence-era land records, previous archaeological surveys, and on-the-ground reconnaissance. By considering the sequential relations of place signs painted in the Mixtec screenfolds, the spatial connections of geographic features visible today (features whose names and recent history are recorded in archival land records), and the sacred connections revealed by the actions of nobles and religious specialists in the Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation, strong proposals for the identification of particular place signs can be made. In turn, these identifications have broader implications for understanding colonial transformations of space. Over the course of the sixteenth century, sprawling pre-Hispanic polities were atomized. The land documents their leaders then created mapped out visions of political space that were far more circumscribed than those we see in pre-Hispanic books, and indeed in alphabetic documents—such as the Yanhuitlan idolatry investigation—that date to the first half of the sixteenth century. This suggests that different types of research methods are needed for studying landscape representations created before and after the middle of the sixteenth century.
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