Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (Cuauhtinchan Map #2, also known in the literature by the abbreviation MC2) is one of five indigenous maps from the sixteenth century Valley of Puebla, that documents the history of the Chichimeca Cucuhtinchantlacas. This map is a post-conquest document done in amate paper in a traditional cartographic history style very common in Mesoamerica (Boone, 2000) and used to recount creation myths, migrations, battles and allegiances, and to document lineages and territorial boundaries (Reyes, 1977).
Mapping
Mapmaking is a cultural expression evidenced in different forms in any human community over time and space: From fourth century BC (400 BC) China to nineteenth century Europe, maps have been a medium that materialized or translated man's relationship to the world around it; as Harley puts it “There are few aspects of human action and thought that have not been mapped at one time or another” (Harley, 1991). Maps are a representation of place. As part of the Greek legacy, cartography stressed the “scientific”, methodical, and measurable aspects of these representations, which the European tradition embraced, dismissing the other more subjective discourses; and referring to these non-European maps as “primitive". (see History of Cartography).
Ranging from paintings produced by the Aboriginal people of Australia (Indigenous Australians) to maps of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Native Americans), and from the Marshall Islands stick charts to the battle plans drawn on the ground by Māori warriors in New Zealand, they were widely regarded as an inchoate stage in the cognitive history of cartography. To the extent that they lacked orientation, regular scales, and the Euclidean geometry of modern maps, or were drawn on unfamiliar media, little effort was made to crack their codes of representation. They remained on the periphery of Western cartographic achievement. (Harley, 1991)
As cartography encompassed both the Western world and non-Western world expressions its definition expanded from just being cognitive structures to understand space to be a contextual historical discourse.
Aztec Cartographic Histories
Post-conquest indigenous cartographic expressions were an example of the conscientious combination of the foreign and indigenous styles, an active reflection of the cultural changes taking place at that moment in Mesoamerica. The maps and the mapmaking that came from Europe to the New World during the conquest were “framed by a scientific rationale, primarily accentuating economic, social, and political boundaries and often ignoring levels of signs and abstractions deeply rooted in the cultural context and social order where a map is produced” (Botero, 2006). With this in mind Aztec maps were not just layouts of the empire, but actually cartographic histories. Not only those documented how things were arranged in space but they told stories and were a common method of presenting space and movement through it and Mexican historians made remarkable use of this technique (Boone, 2000). According to Elizabeth Hill Boone any story is tied to a protagonist (who), a date (when), and a location (where); and maps such as the MC2 allowed the representation of these three elements, therefore they were a suitable discourse for their stories.