Event Date: Friday, March 8, 2019
Mapping old roads on the Puebla-Oaxaca border of Southern Mexico
Nicholas Johnson
Research Associate, Royal Ontario Museum
Friday, March 8th, 2019
2:30-3:30pm
1004 SSC
This talk draws on ethnographic fieldwork and a mapping project to provide a historiographic analysis of roads linking towns of the border area and further south in the state of Oaxaca with the market town of Tehuacán, Puebla. These roads that once crossed a mountainous area on the border between the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca in Southern Mexico have an ancient past and a recent history. The evidence for their antiquity comes from archaeology and pictographic manuscripts, and elders recount memories of the old roads before they became obsolete tell of their recent history. With the exception of a recently constructed expressway, no roads presently cross this border area, which on modern maps has the appearance of a gap, or zone of separation, rather than the corridor of communication it once was until the 1950s, when displacement of pack animals by motor vehicles meant that old ravines and riverbed thoroughfares gradually fell into disuse.
Johnson's interests in this area and the old roads that traversed it converge with those of Mexican archaeologist Blas Castellón Huerta, who has supported the project and at times collaborated with him on it. Mapping was supported by extensive help from cartographer Christopher Hewitt of Western University.
Nick Johnson earned his PhD in 2005 in Latin American Studies, specializing in pictographic manuscripts. He is, with Sebastian van Doesburg, coauthor of The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca (Arni Brownstone, editor; Royal Ontario Museum, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).
Part of the Department of Geopgraphy Speaker Series