milli (Mdz27r)
This element of an agricultural field (milli) has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Itzmiquilpan (see below). This milli is a horizontal, segmented rectangle, alternating in orange and purple. The segments have dots and backward C-shapes, which seem to suggest cultivation.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Xitlali Torres
The rectangle on the lower edge of this image from plate 20 of the Codex Borgia (pre-contact) shows what is an agricultural piece of land, given the maize plants growing up from it. Like the Codex Mendoza tlalli, milli, and chinamitl iconography, this one is separated into what may be parcels with alternating terracotta and dark gray coloration. What is different about each possible parcel are the lines for what may be furrows that alternate perpendicularly from the next one. This is similar to the chinampas that alternate in the map from San Pedro Tlahuac in our Mapas Project. Elizabeth Hill Boone has also noted this alternation in chinampas in Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism, Boone, Burkhart, and Tavárez eds., Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2017, 48 and 72. Codex Borgia image thanks to Mexicolore. Also, thanks to James Maffie for bringing these comparisons to the fore (personal communication 13 March 2025).
agricultural field
Codex Mendoza, folio 27 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 64 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
