Deciphering Sands and Stones

The Codex Vergara and the Codex de Santa María Asunción are two cadastral documents produced in sixteenth-century New Spain. The manuscripts employ the hieroglyphic writing system used by Nahuatl-speaking scribes of precolonial and early colonial Mexico, seemingly to record local classifications of agricultural lands. For over a century, scholars have analyzed the codices in attempts to decipher certain hieroglyphs and correlate them with soil types. Their efforts have yielded some consensus, but they have also generated unresolved disagreements. I argue that those disputes are not due solely to errors in decipherment and translation but rather to fundamental differences in how sixteenth-century Mexican surveyors and twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have conceived and classified natural phenomena. Drawing on linguistic and ethnohistoric evidence, I suggest that the codices communicate interest in soils as processes rather than as discrete and stable entities. My argument is not specific to soils or to Nahuatl writing, however. I use these sixteenth-century cadastral documents to illustrate how attending to moments of dissonance in cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons can reveal systems of knowledge that have been lost, forgotten, or overlooked. Those differences and their recognition are at the core of the anthropological enterprise.