Carlos Rincón Mautner, Department of International Relations, Florida International University, Miami FL. Email: carmecol@hotmail.com. Mesoamerican Cosmovision and the Roots of Native Cartography: the View from Coixtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico.

The demise of native populations and destruction of their culture following the Spanish Conquest resulted in a net loss of knowledge including their unique forms of record keeping. With few exceptions, native conventions for recording place names, spatial relations and events, developed over several thousand years, had been completely replaced with European conventions by the middle of the 17th century. Indigenous worldviews and geographic knowledge, and cartographic knowledge specifically, all of which represented sacred landscapes were forgotten. Reconstructing the boundaries and the pre-Hispanic history and worldview of the native kingdom of Coixtlahuaca has been possible owing to the fact that many early Colonial Period painted manuscripts and a cartographic tradition survived for the area. This presentation examines the development of the cartographic tradition among the people of the northern Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca from its possible early manifestation as rock art to the creation of the codices, and discusses problems of interpretation that remain.

Keywords: cosmovision, indigenous cartography, Oaxaca, Mexico.