The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca

The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca is a multiauthored monographic study of an indigenous pictographic document painted on a large sheet of cotton (commonly known as a lienzo) produced in sixteenth-century Oaxaca, Mexico. Originating from the community of Tlapiltepec, the lienzo had been marshaled by the town council as evidence in a land dispute in the early twentieth century when a legal assistant absconded with the document. Through a complicated series of events detailed in the volume, the lienzo ended up in the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2004, the museum communicated directly to the community of Tlapiltepec their plans to install a life-size illustration of the lienzo in the museum as part of a new addition to the anthropology gallery and to keep the original in a dark, climate-controlled storage facility for preservation. The municipal council...