Ñudzavui Geographies
The pages of the Ã’udzavui screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful of these signs have been linked to specific locations on the ground. Rich but underused sources of information on Ã’udzavui geography can be found in colonial and independence-period land boundary documents. These include early twentieth-century copies of nineteenth-century town boundary maps in the Mapoteca Orozco y Berra (Mexico City); sixteenth- to twentieth-century alphabetic land litigation documents, some of them with accompanying maps, in the Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City), nineteenth- and twentieth-century alphabetic texts and maps in the Archivo General Agrario (Mexico City) and the Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca (Oaxaca City); and land documents housed in municipal archives in the Mixteca itself. Mesolore’s “Ã’udzavui Geographies” presents the results of a project (funded by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies) to document and combine geographic information about the Mixteca Alta from these various archives.
The following resources are included:
a pdf index compiling all of the towns and Mixtec place names encountered during research, organized by document;
dozens of small-scale maps in which the place names for each particular document have been plotted;
a large-scale map which combines the information from each individual document-map; and
alphabetic transcriptions of the various documents consulted and from which the data in the index and maps have been taken.
In addition, a brief essay on “Initial Findings” provides an explanation of the methods used in this research, a guide for using the above-mentioned resources, and a discussion of some of the patterns found in these documents. In particular, “Initial Findings” discusses what these land documents reveal about how place names changed over the course of the colonial and independence periods, and how these diachronic changes shape how we can use place names attested in colonial and independence-period documents to interpret the rich topographies painted in the prehispanic and early colonial Mixtec screenfolds.