The study of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism because of the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form part of the process through which territory comes into being. While many studies have therefore focused on the history of instrumental surveying and cartography in New Spain, roughly equivalent to present-day Mexico, between the seventeenth and twentieth century, the textual surveys of the sixteenth century that helped to bring the initial colonial territory into being have gone largely unstudied. Content analysis of textual land surveys included in sixteenth-century viceregal land grants for sheep and cattle ranches demonstrates variation in references to distance, direction, and borders that begins to reveal a process of negotiation among local actors and centralized state power that was contingent on environmental, economic, and demographic differences between highland and lowland landscapes.With the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form 'part of the process by which territory becomes,' the effort to understand the emergence of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism. 1 In general, surveyors employed their specialized training in the use of instruments such as transits and compasses to take field measurements and convert them into cadastral and smaller-scale maps that made territory 'legible' to the colonial administration. 2 The boundaries surveyors established, both abstractly on paper and concretely on the landscape with posts and other monuments, enabled 'places to appear and be named' so that settlers could establish who and where they were: 'the act of settling was not a matter of marking out pre-existing boundaries, but one of establishing symbolic enclosures.' 3 As a social process that helped colonial territory come into being, surveying modulated the complex interactions among local actors, centralized state power, and specific landscapes. 4 Recent research on colonial New Spain, now Mexico, has raised questions about how that process might have operated during the first century of colonization. The use of instruments to survey land and associated cadastral cartography emerged only in the 1630s, about a century after Hernán Cortés and the other conquistadors established the colony. 5 Moreover, surveying went into decline in the first half of the nineteenth century, shortly after Mexico became politically independent from Spain. A variety of factors contributed to that late start and sudden decline, including the high cost of surveying, the latent boundary disputes that surveying tended to antagonize rather than resolve, and the upheaval of the revolutionary war in the 1810s and its aftermath. Meanwhile, research on land use during the Early Colonial Period (1521e1620) has revealed that despite the late start of instrumental surveying, the Spaniards