The ''Códice de Santa María Asunción'' is mid-16th century

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...

n pictorial codex, with

Nahuatl Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

glosses, containing

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

es of twelve rural communities in Tepetlaoztoc, in the

Acolhua The Acolhua are a Mesoamerican people who arrived in the Valley of Mexico in or around the year 1200 CE. The Acolhua were a sister culture of the Aztecs (or Mexica) as well as the Tepanec, Chalca, Xochimilca and others. The most important p ...

area near Texcoco. The codex contains provides important information about community economic and social structure shortly after the conquest. The editors of the facsimile edition estimate the codex was created in stages, with the core glyphic depictions drawn around 1544, with householders, cadastrals of their landholdings. They posit the alphabetic

glosses were added later over 30-year period. The glosses include names of the householder, kin relationships, land assignments, and miscellaneous annotations. A third component the codex, called "The Asunción Land Title," is a lengthy account in Nahuatl that sets the territorial boundaries of the settlement (''tlaxilacalli'') of Santa María Asunción. Analysis of this codex along with Codex Vergara have revealed details of a complex land survey system utilized by the Aztecs including the ability to calculate the areas of irregular plots of land.Barbara J. Williams and H.R. Harvey, "Aztec Arithmetic: Positional Notation and Area Calculations" ''Science'', 210:499-505.

References

Santa Maria Asuncion, Codice de {{Mesoamerica-stub