February 8, 2025 Dr. Sarah Newman, University of Chicago: “The “Good Farmers”: Soil Types and Soil Transformations in the Codex Vergara and the Codex de Santa María Asunción.”
In the mid-16th century, a few decades after Spaniards had reclaimed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan as the city of Mexico, scribes in the nearby region of Tepetlaoztoc recorded two pictorial census-cadastral documents, now known as the Codex Vergara and the Codex de Santa María Asunción. Those manuscripts convey a wealth of information about landowners, landholdings, and soil types or qualities, primarily through the pictographic writing system used by indigenous Nahuatl-speaking communities of Central Mexico, occasionally accompanied by glosses or annotations in alphabetic Nahuatl and/or Spanish. In this presentation, I focused on certain inconsistencies or discrepancies that have been noted by scholars who have examined the two codices and the glyphs used to represent soils since the 19th century. Although earlier analysts interpreted those inconsistencies or discrepancies either as scribal errors or as disagreements among scribes, I reexamined them to ask whether they might reflect actual changes in the land. If so, changes in soil glyphs over time record intentional interventions and amendments and their effects on anthropogenic agricultural soils.
Sarah Newman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research combines archaeological, historical, and art historical methods and evidence to explore anthropological and environmental issues, including histories of waste and reuse, long-term landscape transformations, and human-animal relationships. She primarily conducts research in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mesoamerica and the ancient Maya, but is also involved in comparative projects to study landscapes, infrastructure, and environment in other parts of the world. She is the author of Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and co-author of Temple of the Night Sun: A Royal Tomb at El Diablo, Guatemala (Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, 2015).
