chinamitl (Mdz42r)

The term chinamitl was more often associated with the agricultural parcels carved from the lake islands and littoral, what people call "floating gardens," but they were not really floating. The dots and u's seem to suggest agricultural activity; perhaps it is an indication that a parcel that has been planted. The presence of a plant upon it (in the compound from which this was carved) underlines the fertility of the parcel. The u's look something like horseshoe prints, but this iconography reaches back on stone carvings into pre-contact times, before the horse was reintroduced in Mesoamerica. The chinamitl, as represented here, does not differ greatly from the appearance of the tlalli or the milli, both of which were also agricultural parcels. The tlalli will more often have alternating purple and orange segments than the milli typically does (see below, right). We also have a segmented, orange and purple chinamitl from the Codex Mendoza.