Tetl Iztac (CmpRG)

On the Cempoala map there is no church clearly associated with the landscape feature, a pairing that usually indicates an inhabited place. However, the white stone on the mountain landscape is surely what gives the neighboring altepetl (town, but called a "cabecera," head town in Spanish) of Tetliztacan its name. This latter community has its own Relación Geográfica that states this this place name “means hill of white stone, called that because of hills with white stone.” The implication is that the white stone peaks are nearby (folio 1 recto). In fact, the place glyph for this community is similar to the image found on the Cempoala map. On the Tetliztacan map there is a deliberate pairing of the hill with a church; they are connected by a red line (Relación de Tetlistaca, https://collections.lib.utexas.edu/catalog/utblac:d6867ccb-092b-47b1-87a...). Since there are a few exceptions to the hill-church pairing on the Cempoala map, it is just possible that its “Tetliztac” refers to both the landscape feature and the pueblo of Tetliztacan. There is a church in the vicinity on the map, which though it seems to be associated with a different place, could possibly be serving to indicate more than one community in what is a fairly crowded area of elements (see the historical contextualizing image). For more information about the Relación, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), Mundy (1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 65-66.