
440 year-old maps filled with footprints - pseudolus
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/23/753114640/440-years-old-and-filled-with-footprints-these-arent-your-everyday-maps
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inflatableDodo
> _We need to stop thinking that the conquest was the worst thing that ever
> happened to these local people_

Unfortunately it is rather difficult to make such a comparison, as the
conquistadors eliminated so many of the written artifacts along with those who
could read them, that we now do not have enough surviving examples or
remaining knowledge to currently decipher the contents of what little remains.

~~~
clarkevans
It's a juicy counter-narrative quote. But, even in this excerpt, Rosario Inés
Granados didn't say that the conquest wasn't the worst thing to happen to
indigenous peoples. Quite the contrary, she asks us to think differently about
it, "She says the maps demonstrate that the indigenous groups that lived in
Mexico were more than just fodder for genocide."

With her exhibition, Dr. Granados is trying to focus our attention on agency:
the clever, if not subversive, acts of hybridization that locals used to
preserve their heritage while under the thumb of foreign invaders. Creating
maps and other works of art that passed the sniff test of the Spaniards, yet,
in a parallel narrative, spoke to a subjugated indigenous audience. "Maps show
us not only what is where and how to get there, but also who we were — and
perhaps, who we're going to be."

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hbarka
The Teozacoalco map strikes me as created by someone who understood the idea
of a round Earth. Notice the orientation of the drawn characters on the
surface. Did they have this notion already? Certainly the ship navigators
would have.

~~~
wtdata
Of course they did. For some reason in today's popular culture, we have this
strange idea that the common knowledge that the Earth was round, only came to
be after the 16th century.

That's totally wrong, common people knew the Earth was round for 2 millennia
in the old world.

In the new world, surely the Maia knew it as well given their extremely
advanced astronomical knowledge for the time. Incan astronomy, although not as
advanced, was still quite sophisticated, they surely understood moon ecplipses
well enough to get that the Earth was round.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth)

