Painting a Map of Sixteenth-century Mexico City

Book excerpt: "In 1975 the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University acquired an exceptional mid-sixteenth-century map of Mexico City, which, until 1521, had been the capital of the Aztecs, the Nahua-speaking peoples who dominated the Valley of Mexico. This extraordinary six-by-three-foot document, showing landholdings and indigenous rulers, has yielded a wealth of information about the artistic, linguistic, and material culture of the Nahua after the Spanish invasion. Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City, edited and with contributions by Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy, is the first publication of both the complete map and the multidisciplinary research that it spurred. A distinguished team of specialists in history, art history, linguistics, and conservation science has worked together for nearly a decade. The result of all their work, this book focuses not only on the map, but also explores the situation of the indigenous people of Mexico City and their interactions with Europeans at the time the map was made. The scientific analysis of the map's pigments and paper carried out by Diana Magaloni Kerpel, Richard Newman, and Michele Derrick in 2007 marks the most thorough examination of a pictorial document from early colonial Mexico to date."--Book Jacket.