chinamitl (Mdz46r)

The chinamitl was 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 meant to appear as a parcel that has been planted. 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, often segmented and multi-colored. Milli entered Spanish as milpa. But a glyph for chinamitl, below, also shows how the emphasis can be placed on the construction that held the mud pulled up from the lake bottom to enrich agricultural parcels.