INDIGENOUS COATS OF ARMS IN TÍTULOS PRIMORDIALES AND TECHIALOYAN CÓDICES: NAHUA CORPORATE HERALDRY IN THE LIENZOS DE CHIEPETLAN, GUERRERO, MEXICO Gerardo Gutiérrez Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado-Boulder, 1350 Pleasant Street, Hale 350/233 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309 Abstract The introduction of European heraldry in the Americas created a special class of material culture and iconography that circulated widely on coins, paper, architecture, and textiles. More interestingly, its appropriation and use by indigenous communities has not received proper archaeological attention. In this paper I analyze the adoption of royal Spanish heraldry by Nahua political systems (altepetl ) during the Colonial period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. My primary goal is to understand the context, meaning, and social practices for three late colonial banners from eastern Guerrero—the Lienzos de Chiepetlan IV, V, and VI. I argue that these three banners can be treated as moveable pieces of a complex heraldic ensemble to form the full ornamented coat of arms of the Spanish king. These three banners permit us to compare and contrast indigenous narratives of allegiance and resistance to Spanish imperialism. Heraldry might seem an arcane topic of study restricted in time and space to European architecture, numismatics, and museums. The emancipation of the American continent from European rule created republican ideologies that fiercely opposed titles of nobility and their associated material and symbolic privileges. Nonetheless, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century heraldic iconogra- phy was widely distributed throughout the Americas. Colonial her- aldry was displayed on a great variety of media, including currency, banners, bureaucratic papers, pottery, clothing, and on the façades of rich palaces and distant royal outposts. Objects stamped with he- raldic iconography helped people to demarcate areas of influence and visually expressed local allegiances to different European royal houses. One factor that often escapes archaeological attention is that the indigenous societies of Mesoamerica quickly embraced the practice of European heraldry. Indigenous rulers and community councils adapted heraldic charges and used them to promote their agendas and goals, creating a large catalog of royally granted and self-assumed coats of arms that have survived over time and need to be studied as part of the archaeological legacy of Mesoamerican cultures. I argue in this paper that coats of arms created by native artists exhibit a pragmatic recognition of the Spanish monarch, who embodied the ultimate source of authority and symbolic power in Spanish America. Indigenous heraldry is critical for understanding acts of corporate allegiance to the royal image as a strategy to mitigate or deflect oppressive practices of the Spanish colonial system. The analysis presented here is based on the direct study of a group of six large-format cotton paintings kept in the archive of San Miguel Chiepetlan, a Nahua community in eastern Guerrero, Mexico (Figure 1). The existence of the Lienzos de Chiepetlan was originally reported in an eighteenth-century geographic de- scription of that parish written by the priest, Don Joseph Mariano Hurtado de Mendoza (Barlow 1949). The Lienzos were not present- ed to Mexican authorities during the agrarian reforms of the first half of the nineteenth century and were believed to have been lost. Fortunately, they resurfaced in 1970 when they were shown to a photographer of the French ethnographic mission in Mexico and published by Joaquín Galarza in 1972. Four decades have passed since Galarza’s first analysis, and no one has since evaluated or expanded on his ideas. I had the opportunity to photograph two of the original paintings in 2000, while undertaking an archaeological survey of Chiepetlan. I was invited to return to Chiepetlan for a fes- tival in 2010 and, during that visit, the Asamblea de Comuneros de Chiepetlan allowed me to analyze thoroughly all the pictorial docu- ments kept in the community under the custody of the Comisariado de Bienes Comunales: Lienzos I, II, III, IV, V, VI; the Techialoyan Panel de Chiepetlan; and the proceedings to legalize their landhold- ings in the Libro de Títulos de 1758. Using Galarza’s detailed de- scriptive publication, I expand his study further by arguing here that each Lienzo de Chiepetlan needs to be understood as an individ- ual chapter of a larger narrative that, once put together, creates a visual título primordial. By this, I mean that together these pictorial documents form a memoir, painted with the intention of recounting the origins and hardships faced by the ancestors of Chiepetlan during the foundation of their community. The colonial genre of títulos primordiales usually highlights the diligence exerted by these altepetl/pueblo founders and its later leaders working for the recognition of the community landholdings by the Spanish co- lonial regime (Florescano 2002; Haskett 2005; Lockhart 1991; 51 E-mail correspondence to: gerardo.gutierrez@colorado.edu Ancient Mesoamerica, 26 (2015), 51–68 Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2015 doi:10.1017/S0956536115000127