Ixcoyamec (Mdz51r)

The hoofs and curling tail do support the peccary assessment. There were pre-Columbian peccaries, and their teeth and bones have been found in Mesoamerican archaeological sites and their images appear in a few codices, according to R. A. Donkin, in "The Peccary," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 75:5 (1985). Donkin also discusses how some peoples ate peccary flesh and others did not. According to Davide Dominici, this glyph from the Codex Mendoza is reminiscent of the coyotl with the hole (coyoctli) on its body. See Dominici's chapter, "Place Names and Political Identities in Teotihuacán Mural Paintings," in Constructing Power and Place in Mesoamerica: Pre-Hispanic Paintings from Three Regions eds. Merideth Paxton and Leticia Staines (Cicero, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

If this place name is not to be read literally, it could refer to the site of one's very own (ixcoyan) magueyes (metl). If this were the case, the compound would be fully phonographic. Working against this reading is the fact that Frances Karttunen finds -ixcoyan must be possessed (as explained in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary).