Mixtec Plaza

This scene from the Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec manuscript, depicts the center of a town: a plaza filled with water. Wagner, Box, and Morehead have proposed that the structure around the plaza, that begins at the top center of the page, goes down the left side, crosses the bottom, and comes back halfway up the right side, shares the C-shape of the Mixtec temple, at the bottom left of the illustration to the right (23). If the two are related, the image could be framed by a temple associated with the “mountain” part of the “water-mountain” glyph.

Reference

• Logan Wagner, Hal Box, and Susan Kline Morehead, Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza: From Primordial Sea to Public Space, Roger Fullington Series in Architecture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).