Tepemaxalco (CmpRG)

The semantic role of church structures is found elsewhere on the map, and this has been noted, as well, by Barbara E. Mundy (see below). The Relación text itself states that all of Cempoala’s dependencies have churches. On the map, Tepemaxalco is located a distance to the left of the main glyph of the cabecera of Cenpoualla (Cempohuallan, Zempoala). Vegetation shown next to the glyph and church is in keeping with the landscape of the region, which Peter Gerhard describes as “a rolling, maguey-covered country of volcanic cones rising slightly above the plain…” (67). The glyph is also situated below and to the left of a series of arches drawn on a corner of the map that according to the Spanish text of the Relación were part of a stone and mortar aqueduct bringing water into the region. This may be what Peter Gerhard describes as “the great aqueduct which carried water from Tecaxete to Otumba” (pgs. 68-69). As Barbara Mundy has noted elsewhere, the “Cempoala map…has no fixed orientation and the presumed viewer is a mobile one.... To see the map, you must move around the work reorienting yourself to its features” (see her article cited, below). Indeed, it has no indications of cardinal directions similar to those found on other mapas dating from the later sixteenth century and found in archival collections, such as in the Ramo de Tierras of the Archivo General de la Nación, México: a sun and/or an alphabetic gloss for west or east (poniente o oriente), a star and/or alphabetic gloss for north (norte), and so forth. For a study of the RG, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/mapping-babel-a-sixteenth-century..., the same author's Mapping of New Spain(1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 50, figure 1. For examples of pictorial maps with indications of the cardinal directions see AGN Tierras Vol. 2519, Exp. 8, Fol. 57r (Cuapantzingo y Xochitepec, Tlaxcala, 1575) and AGN Tierras Vol. 41, Exp. 2, Fol. 27r (Cuahtinchan, Texcoco, 1583). For information about the Cempoala region, see Gerhard, Historical Geography of New Spain (1972).