Tlacopan (CmpRG)

It seems that osier twigs were sometimes used by priests associated with Tlazolteotl to do penance. The twigs (or the arrows that were made from them) were used for piercing the tongue and ears in a blood-letting ritual act. (See Peter DeRoo, History of America before Columbus, 1900, 489, and Hartley Burr Alexander, Latin American, The Mythology of All Races, Vol 11, 1920, 78.)

This simplex glyph seems to name a parcel of land where osier twigs could be obtained (though there is nothing on the map showing these kinds of plants in the vicinity). The probable parcel is indicated by the red boundary of the rectangle in which it sits (see the historical contextualizing image). This place is not associated with a drawing of a church, which on this map usually indicates an inhabited place, although not all settlements had churches at this time in history. For more information about the RG map, see Biblioteca Digital Mexicana, A.C., http://bdmx.mx/documento/mapas-relaciones-geograficas-cempoala-epazoyuca... Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), Mundy (1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 53.