Misc. map-making comments

If it's one thing that historians of the Western Hemisphere lament, it is the vagueness of maps for pre-Mexica and pre-Inka Mesoamerica,  and Peru. You can throw in the Mississippian zone as well. Yes part of it is the relative lack of written sources compared to East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.But even so, what does remain is a very rich archaeological record where remains, objects, and architecture speak with some academic cajoling. The sources we do have range from vague to very descriptive in Mesoamerica but descriptive enough to allow us to map centuries before the arrival of Europeans the the Americas.

In the Andes it gets a bit more complicated. Here you do not have a tradition of books but rather of objects called khipus. These were more akin to accounting ledgers. There are sources that presume to describe with some level of detail the exploits of Wari (pre-Inka) kings. Juha Hiltunen wrote a very long, extremely dense (kudos!) but well-argued book titled "The Ancient Kings of Peru" regarding the reliability of the pre-Inka history chronicles of Fernando de Montesinos and Blas Valera. ASsuming the validity of said chronicles, we can trace political history at least to mid-first millenium of our era which is when the Wari state rose to power across the middle Andean region.

That being said, the vagueness is not warranted for the 15th century. Through native sources and Spanish writings, we can more or less reconstruct complete political maps. By complete I mean frontier to frontier with native names. 

Here is my first go at a partial and very vague political map of North America in the early 1400s. It is by no means complete but it gives me hope in the potential of a mapping project supported by sources in the historical and archaeological record.



In the Mayab, we have the League of Mayapan with rotating capitals at Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Mayapan, merely a Mayan-style Excan Tlahtoloyan, or government of multiple capitals. The most famous one in popular history being the Excan Tlahtoloyan which is commonly called, haphazardly, the "Aztec Empire". 

In the post-Cahokia Mississippian region (green) we have a collection of lordships, which are harder to map with fidelity, along with some higher ranking hegemonic kingdoms which I've tried to differentiate from the rest through different colors. These are Quigualtam (Theloel), Coosa, and Cofitachequi from west to east. 

I wonder whether there is an oral history tradition for the Mississippian realms or if these were lost in the tumult of the Mississippian Shatter Zone and the ethnogenesis of intervening centuries. We can't discount the catastrophic effects of ethnocidal U.S. deportation policies in the 19th century on native nations from the southeastern U.S.

It is a continual project and one which will hopefully come to fruition in the future.

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