Cartographic archives: Excavating the subterranean with a camera

Maps are complex artifacts that can simultaneously illuminate and obscure. They bridge the realms of the visible and the invisible, probing the limits of what can or cannot be seen. Much like any piece of literature, maps carry with them an authorial voice, a specific vision of the world, and a desire to make that vision known to others. In any map, the mapmaker's voice conveys a desire to materialize the land through a specific signification system composed of names, lines, dots, and signs (Harley, 1988;1989; 2002). Yet close analysis of dozens of historical Hacienda maps of an Indigenous town in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico (drawn between 1866, 1918, and 1919 by Yucatec cartographers) reveals another possible reading of maps. This reading of maps is grounded in a photographic approach that explores the visual multiplicities of these documents, powerful reminders of Indigenous history tied to the Yucatec henequen (Agave fourcroydes) plantation system and the consolidation of both modern agrarian capitalism and the formation of the Mexican state at the beginning of the 20th century.¹

Using the camera as an instrument of observation, I dwell in the materiality of maps, allowing the different visions of the document to be the main point of departure for my thinking. This essay explores how map fragments shown here² can be understood as an archive of Yucatec subterranean history, characterized by the entanglement between Indigenous history, changing mapping practices, and different orientations toward the land. As my main instrument of visual analysis, the camera allows me to examine the cartographic history of a Mayan town called Homún.³ The careful revision of this history shows the historical inscription of a number important number of subterranean sites, described in their original Mayan names: Xkeben, Yaxbacaltun, Onichen, Akabchen, Xmamil, Xcuchen, Acula, Oxola, Chelem, Koman, Kampepen Noria, Chen Kanun, Chenchibe, Pozo Jaybil, Tihohob. All these names will eventually disappear from the contemporary maps of this town. Nevertheless, when analyzing these older maps, the Mayan names of places are still there, and by looking at these sites, reinscribing them through the camera, we illuminate the narratives hidden in their Mayan toponymics. Here, the names and the very act of naming the subterranean foregrounds a particular history of Indigenous dwelling in the land. Even in the earliest accounts of the Maya, such as those recorded in the pages of the classic Mayan book of origins known as Popol Wuj, the underground space of Xibalba and the Seven Caves of Life is understood as the main source of the divine, all life, and the origins of humans (Breton et al., 2003). Naming this subterranean place is thus a way of calling attention to the Indigenous relations sustained by the recognition of subterranean spaces and their histories. It is a form of memorializing the specific social worlds connected to the underground and the life made possible above the ground through everything underneath.

The argument of this essay is simultaneously anthropological and aesthetic, where the photographs are essential elements for the sensorial apprehension of the map as a site of social memory. My approach to these images considers the materiality of the map as a point of departure to engage in a speculative reading of the Indigenous histories of this town in southern Mexico. I center my attention on the new material forms produced through visual magnification to find a different reading of these maps, one situated at the limit of the unknown elements of this region. Both the known and the unknown are negotiated by illuminating the physical characteristics of the paper as an unexpected site of history. This Indigenous-inspired reading of maps as instruments of concealment allows us to reconsider the potential rereading of maps as subversive tools to destabilize their intrinsic colonial gaze and historical silences (Trouillot, 1995). Could the materiality of a map become an essential space for political intervention beyond the critique of its colonial origins? Could a re-reading of a map illuminate another kind of analytical move? What would such a reading offer to us? What kinds of voices and subjectivities could we uncover in the material traces of the map understood as a vibrant archive?

Two closely intertwined forms of “dwelling” structure my thinking around this image (Figure 1). Dwelling—both as a process of inhabiting the land and occupying a map's visual space. Both forms of dwelling involve finding a space for oneself. My use of the concept of dwelling is informed by Mayan writers, whose poetic imagination perceives the land as “the consequence of the various relations between iik (wind), cháak (rain), k’áax (land/forest), as a space co-created among birds, animals, sounds, silences, dreams, colors, lights, and shadows” (Uc, 2021). This Indigenous Mayan perspective on multiply produced land is enriched by Keith H. Basso's (1996) work on Apache maps, demonstrating how narratives are preserved and circulated through place names, thereby becoming critical forms of Indigenous wisdom grounded in the practice of dwelling. More specifically, Basso's analysis of “place-names” highlights dwelling as a necessary step in interpreting Apache—and arguably Mayan—maps. Overall, my analysis of Mayan Indigenous names and naming practices in this essay views annotations as acts of authorship that gain significance through a cumulative history of readings, uses, and misuses (Kalir & Garcia, 2021). Central to my understanding of these maps is how the names of places and the collective history of readings and uses of those names constitute a distinct form of agency through memory. A specific agency that manifests through the memorialization of different encounters of people with the land. Here, I reflect on the material and visual instability of cartographies, considering them as objects full of vibrancy.

Unlike other maps of Yucatán, the maps of the town of Homún found at the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, (AGEY) archives are unique in their depiction of the complex local geology, one that is defined by thousands of caves, sinkholes, underground rivers, and other subterranean spaces with their original Mayan names. As Mayan historian José Ángel Koyok Kú (2023) notes in his work, Yucatec sinkholes and caves have historically been central resources for Mayan communities as the only sources of potable water in the region, as sites of agroecological abundance, and as critical landmarks to define land rights between groups. Yucatec historians have shown the material and symbolic importance of subterranean sites during the colonial and postcolonial eras (Bracamonte Sosa, 1993, 2003; Ortiz Yam, 2011). However, in a region faced with rapidly growing agroindustry and large-scale infrastructure projects, many of these critical subterranean sites have been erased from both the maps and from the local landscape in lieu of homogeneous and flattened spaces better suited for capitalist extraction. The essay works against this capitalist flattening impulse, tracing instead the signs of erasure and the marks of Mayan presence that are still visible on paper, traces that can still be read in the toponymics that are intimately tied to the local Mayan history and memory.

In the multiple exposure photographs that ground this essay, the camera looks closely—even microscopically—at maps and their multiple layers of names, erasures, and absences, seeking a new medium to reinscribe this place's local history and memory. In doing so, we speculate about the histories of the subterranean world from the vantage point of a small Indigenous town in southern Mexico. Looking at these maps and the various annotations of the local terrain, instances of friction render visible both the mapmaker's production and historical use of the map and the voices of Mayan Others whose experience of place is pushed to the margins. Using photography as a medium of analysis allows this piece to interrogate the history of the subterranean landscape of this small town through a multimodal approach of visual magnification, reinscription, and superposition made possible through the lens of the camera. Such a process also allows us to bring back to life subterranean “place-names” and their interconnected histories of Indigenous dwelling.

In this alternative reading of historical hacienda maps of Homún, the emergent blurs and opacities in the photographs become an opening to read the multiple voices of each cartography. The long-forgotten Mayan names of these subterranean sites get recovered through the camera and become once again narrative instruments, rendering visible the sounds, silences, dreams, colors, lights, and shadows that make Mayan land possible. The hacienda map changes prove the consolidation of a capitalist agrarian world over the last century. Yet, they also offer a way of reading these Mayan signs as symbols of a local history of Indigenous resistance. Mayan communities defend their territories by protecting the names, memories, and material realities of the parts of the land that make life possible.

Anthropologist William Hanks (2009) once said that anyone who has spent time with Yucatec people will recognize the complexities of Indigenous identity in the peninsula. Most Mayans will tell you that the language they speak is not “real” Maya and that they do not see themselves as “really” Maya either. Both statements are expressed frequently in Yucatec Maya and Spanish. Mayan indigeneity is often both apparent and elusive. Indigenous poet, Pedro Uc (Uc, 2021) has argued that being Mayan is not a reality that is necessarily defined by skin color or language but by specific values and ethics toward the land. For him, Mayan indigeneity is best understood as a distinctive relationship to place, history, and community. In his writings on rebellion, resistance is a process of rendering visible the sounds, silences, dreams, colors, lights, and shadows that make the continued existence of Mayan people on this land possible.

The physical transformation of the map over time allows us to consider maps as repositories of the region's multiple moments of colonialism and dispossession. Critical to this methodology is the commitment to build a multimodal reading of maps as actual archives and not just naturalized one-to-one depictions of the world. Turning our attention to maps as physical records means attuning ourselves to intertwined collective histories over time; it means considering the kind of “enunciability” made possible through a map reading (Derrida, 1996). My approach here aims to interrogate the relations between maps, mapmakers, and map-readers by attuning myself to the changing material qualities of documents. As I pursue this argument, however, I remain cautious of perpetuating the violent colonial logic traditionally embedded in the “ways of seeing” characteristic of cartography and photography (Takarawa et al., 2019).

Instead, I consider how certain forms of historical mutability of maps—materialized in their progressive decay and erasure—can allow us to interrogate the past through its absences and transformations. This method aims to disrupt the tendency of Western cartography to flatten land. Building on King's (2019) work, I find in the close-up examinations of cartographic details instances of friction that bring into sharp relief both the cartographer and the Indigenous Other, whose experience of this place is progressively erased from this mathematical view of the land. King's analysis of the visual elements map as a critical site of signification also resonates with my experience of Mexican maps where “the space and place of the White human is established not by embodied and physical representation but through a signification system composed of text, grid lines, and logocentric and geometric symbols that establish subjectivities with cartographic authority through the symbols of property possession” (87).

The signification system that I explore in these maps extends beyond the text, grid lines, and geometric symbols and goes deeper into the material traces of the map as a physical object. Through each image, I offer here, the names, creases, pushpin holes, and hues of the map constitute the signification system through which the presence of the cartographer and the attempted erasure of Mayan life can be read on the maps. However, the decay and transformation of these maps become a language of its own, a collection of symbols whose referential range of events and persons transforming the map depicts a singular history of silences and shadows.

My approach here embraces the “disruptive force” of archival documents instead of the all-too-common modernist narratives of the camera and the map as stable preservers of a fixed past (Smith & Hennessy, 2018), taking the photograph and the map as important sites open to interpretation and necessary intervention. Overall, in this methodological intervention, I embrace and strategically mobilize the polysemy of visual media to explore the colonial making and unmaking of land in Mexico, an approach that strategically considers the “indexical excess” of images—how a single image can point to an infinite number of interpretative directions (Taylor, 1996), to create new analytical possibilities for cartographic constructs. The theoretical framing for how to read these maps as archives emerges from a broader turn in anthropology toward multimodality—the ethnographic engagement with nontextual media. Like other scholars of multimodality, I find the nontextual objects encountered in and through fieldwork to be rich traces of the peoples, places, and processes we investigate in our ethnographic work. I believe that cultivating a new kind of attention to these traces has allowed me to discover different relationships with my ethnographic research. Like Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón (2019), I see multimodal practice as a way of creating new relations. I evoke a particular orientation to media here, which sees multimodal research as a practice that constructs and illuminates “relations between relations.”

Working against the futility of adopting an entirely “iconophobic position” (Taylor, 1996), which takes traditionally logocentric approaches to research as somehow less mediated and more transparent, I follow the lead of scholars whose work moves productively between the tensions of producing nontextual media (Alvarez Astacio et al., 2021). Like them, I, too, am inspired by Tina Campt's (2017) vision of media as a means to reconsider the voices of those who might have been historically silenced. My attention in this essay focuses on the productive overlap between cartography and photography, which takes multimodal scholarship as a means of probing and blurring the boundaries between the two media and between reality and fiction (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón, 2019). The productive juxtaposition of cartography with photography responds to long-established silences by blurring the lines between the documentary and the figurative nature of images, creating a different kind of archive open to a kind of fictive realism. This exercise of fictive realism is grounded in the analysis of names and naming practices connected to sites depicted on the map. Names, I argue, can reveal on these historical maps a unique history of dwelling—specific forms of inhabiting the land of the peninsula and its subterranean worlds.

The Yucatan Peninsula hides a complex subterranean landscape under an apparently flat and simple geography. Below the surface of this monumental limestone block, the Yucatec Karst Aquifer System gets continuously recharged by the water that slips through the numerous cracks, fractures, and uneven holes of this intensely porous landscape (Aguilar et al., 2016), making all this critical porosity, part of the aquifer. Located at the center of this vastly interconnected subterranean world, the Maya have learned to live with these subterranean sites for hundreds of years. Analyzing the importance of water in Yucatán, Llanes Salazar (2025, 32) notes that “in addition to being the main natural source of fresh water in the state, sinkholes have been dynamic actors in the history of the Yucatan Peninsula . . . since they have been repositories of archaeological remains, have shaped the dynamics of colonialism, have influenced wars and rebellions, have been sites of rituals, objects of dispute and, increasingly, sites of large-scale tourism.”

Even under the immense hardship and violence of Spanish colonial rule, Mayan scribes maintained a unique relationship with the land and its underground as sites of sociosymbolic inscription, producing numerous documents reaffirming the boundaries of different settlements and their territorial claims. Eiss's (2010) work on the history of Yucatán reminds us that many of those texts narrated in great detail ritual walks through the land performed by Maya people to collectively observe and remember the exact location and the physical characteristics of stone mounds, trees, and other critical elements of the landscape as they moved through the land. Commenting on this practice, Eiss further notes that “such walks were rituals of possession that often took several days to complete and that led to the production of an extensive body of documentation that legitimated the kahs and the ch'ibals [Mayan settlement patterns structured through kin] that controlled them. Theirs were histories embedded in the land: in stone markers, trees, and other landmarks, in ritual walks of possession and in Mayan documents that made those features and walks into expressions of community, sovereignty, and history” (24). These rituals of possession have left indelible marks in the landscape and in the specific names of the places that witnessed those walks and those collective rituals of naming. The Mayan names of sinkholes and caves represent specific expressions of community, sovereignty, and history connected to the subterranean and its centrality in Indigenous life. Names imprinted on the land, such as Kampepen (yellow butterflies) or Yaxbacaltun (green corncob rock), tell stories about the forms of the dwelling of the Maya in this place that we now call Yucatán.

Following Keith Basso's (1996) work on the practice of “sensing a place,” I see the Mayan names of sinkholes and caves as instances of dwelling, as examples of historical forms of apprehending sites through the lived relationships that people maintain with the subterranean world. Mayan names like Kampepen or Yaxbacaltun tie these landscapes to Indigenous histories of habitation that continue to be present in the kinds of objects and qualities evoked by these names. When considering the forms of wisdom that are contained in the experiences of the Apache with the landscape, Basso further emphasizes the importance of naming, noting that one cannot imagine an Apache's sense of place in the world without some notion of places such as “Old Man Owl” or the “Grasshoppers Piled Up Across.” Similar to the Old Man Owl site, the Kampepen subterranean site carries in its name a presence that exceeds that of its physical characteristics. These names also carry a form of agency that can still be read on the maps. While names are often accepted to imply a form of agency in so far as naming delimits the discursive extension of an object, the agency of naming in sites seems to go much further than that.

The places we have been to before intrinsically evoke memories in us. Coming across places that continue to carry their Mayan names illustrates the specific disposition of the people who have inhabited these lands toward their own history and sense of belonging to a territory. Building on this key insight, Basso asserts that places possess an unusual capacity for triggering “thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become” (107). Critical in Basso's understanding of place is this connection between the practice of walking through space and the process of narrating one's own history in connection with the elements of the landscape. A sense of personhood materialized at each step taken through the hills, the trees, or the caves on the horizon. In this sense, walking through the land and recalling the names of sites is akin to reliving the memories and stories that structure the version of the self that has been created over a long time, over many walks taken through the land, and over many moments of recalling the names attached to the landscape.

The action of walking through the land and dwelling in the landscape is at once an act of memorialization and also an act of apprehension of place as something more, as part of one's sense of self. As Basso insists, recalling the names of places is a way of appropriating portions of the earth and turning a place into a space for sociocultural habitation. This form of reading the landscape is only possible because of a historical affinity of the local Indigenous communities with different forms of knowing and making sense of the various landscape elements. To say this is to note that people's experiences in a given geography can determine the kinds of affective dispositions to a place people cultivate and use to narrate those places. For example, writing about the historical invisibility of Mayan communities and their sites of symbolic importance, Koyok Kú (2024) describes how the sinkholes located in the k’áax are also an important feature of this land since they represent a means of communicating with the underground world, a place with its own distinct more-than-human “owners,” entities who dwell in sinkholes and caves and help mediate relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. As is made clear by Koyok Kú’s work, subterranean sites such as sinkholes and caves have long been critical dwelling sites for humans and more-than-human beings alike.

To excavate the maps of Homún, I evoke Basso's sense of place and King's specific form of signification system composed of text, grid lines, and symbols. In doing so, I aim to recover at least partially the meaning of the subterranean among Mayan communities. If, as Pedro Uc (2021, 45) notes, land is but the consequence of the “relations between iik (wind), cháak (rain), k’áax (land/forest); a space co-created among birds, animals, sounds, silences, dreams, colors, lights, and shadows,” then perhaps Basso's sense of place and King's signification system can be mobilized to read maps as a ritual of interrogating the liminal nature of Mayan land. This means reading Indigenous history by embracing the coexistence of sounds, silences, lights, and shadows on every map. It means embracing the necessary unfinished nature of these spaces yet to be fully seen.

Following this, a new history of the subterranean landscapes of the peninsula can still be found in the momentary reemergence of Mayan names, historical blurs, and territorial opacities that become observable in historical maps through the use of the camera. Through each double-exposure image I have produced here, the overlapped names, creases, pushpin holes, and the hues of the map become a signification system of lights and shadows through which the presence of the cartographer and the Mayan people can be simultaneously read. But reading these spaces of absence requires developing a new kind of sight. Photographs here need to be turned into instruments of vision that do not just reproduce objects but bring new possibilities for making sense of these subterranean landscapes. These double-exposure images bring back into existence a specific form of experience of the land. Each image offers an “optical intensification” of the map through which the transformation of our eyesight makes possible the production of new “forms of observation” (Moholy-Nagy, 1936). Each instance of optical intensification arrests the landscape and fixes the names, textures, shapes, and blurs that have shaped this landscape, providing a new experience of the history of this place.

Maps hide information in plain sight. History is hidden in the Maya names of sites, in the holes left by pushpins, in the crayon lines drawn over territories, and in the slowly decaying fibers around the creases of the map. However, uncovering these stories requires more than close observation; it requires developing new sensibilities for the medium. Names need to be deciphered. Old lines and planes need to be disrupted. Geometry needs to be layered. Linear perspective needs to be blurred. The acquisition of a new tool of vision becomes imperative in this effort. New sights have to be altogether constructed. To this end, I offer a collection of photographs of small annotations on maps of Homún. My hope is that the viewer will dwell on these images with me while crafting their own point of contemplation. I find it necessary to construct new geographies for us to inhabit. Habitation, however, can be found anywhere in the world: on the tiny hole left by centuries of folding, the waxy line left by a crayon, or the discolored piece of an old map. In each photograph, I seek to obfuscate the apparent homogeneity of the cartographic paper, opening up the paper to new kinds of experiences of place. Each one of the photographs in this essay is imprinted by the small details of old and new worlds. Each close-up photograph invites the reader to do a speculative reading of the cumulative history of names, readings, uses, and misuses through which the materiality of the map has been actively shaped through the years.

In their respective analyses of anthropological work, Marilyn Strathern (2022) and Ann Laura Stoler (2008) have called attention to the “strategies of immersement” and “forms of immersement” required for research. Through their work, they explore the analytical affordances of approaching the archives in one way or another. Every reading of an archive is different for an ethnographer and allows you to arrive at a different point. In this case, my reading of the archive is photographic, bringing me to a different place. Inspired by Campt's (2017) approach to photography, I dwell on the multiple-exposure photographs of the historical maps of Yucatán. Like Campt, I find that there are still many ways of reading these images, each capable of revealing a different story. Dwelling on the photos of the material details of maps, I imagine readers may find the space to stay with these photographs a little longer. Photographs might become spaces of reverie and conduits for a speculative immersion into place. Perhaps staying a little longer in this place, in the place of the map, can allow coexisting voices—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—to be preserved at the map's margins.

My move toward the speculative recalibration of photographs of cartographic annotations seeks to open up what Campt refers to as “the radical interpretive possibilities of images” (5), offering us new ways of experiencing and making sense of a multiplicity of maps, and a polyphony of voices to be excavated through these pages. Like Campt, I am committed to exploring the potential of rereading images like maps as a way of rejecting not just the gaze of the state but also, in my case, the liberal colonial gaze that obscures the subterranean through the erasure of Mayan history and toponymics. The photographs of this project help illustrate the material decay of maps and offer a visual immersion into what this land was and what could have been. The possible, probable, and plausible are all conjured by the collection of photos. At the same time, the list of its speculative affordances offers us a new analytical ground against which the maps, the layers of annotations, and the actual landscapes can be read and make sense of.

Working against the overall flattening of one of the richest subterranean landscapes in the world, the multiple exposure photographs and the list of speculative affordances included in this exercise invite the viewers to immerse themselves in a state of disorientation, quiet contemplation, and historical dwelling. Each image highlights new productive frictions between the various overlapping authors of each map. The authoring of the map as such requires us to adopt a signification system built around material decay. Each image demonstrates the meaning-making potential of the disintegration of the map through the acts of moving, folding, unfolding, displaying, hanging, redrawing, and highlighting. Erasure and decay are their own kind of language. One that provides a new space for interrogating the transformation of the land over hundreds of years.

The names of these specific places—all Mayan toponymics—in the images bring back to us the ancient practice of experiencing the subterranean world through the elegantly simple act of enunciation. Names bring back something important to us. The creases, pushpin holes, and paper fibers become a signification system through which multiple forms of presence can be read. Decay and transformation become a language of their own, a collection of incomplete symbols simultaneously fading away and gaining potent new meanings through the camera. As instruments of vision, cartographic photographs bring speculative possibilities into existence, intensifying the visual experience of the map and producing different kinds of observation vis-à-vis the subterranean world of the Yucatan Peninsula and its Indigenous histories. Through the photographic recalibration of cartographic annotations, old Mayan epistemologies of place could open up, even for a brief moment. An endless Mayan subterranean world suddenly becomes—if not fully visible, at least imaginable—somehow graspable through the names, blurs, and opacities that suggest an altogether different way of inhabiting this land. Inspired by the polyphony and opacity that characterized the nature of Mayan texts and poetry, I write these meandering lines, hoping they help us explore those relationships between that which is hidden by the passage of time and that which is revealed by the recognition of those absences left on the paper. Perhaps it is precisely at these underground depths where darkness resides so thoroughly, so completely, that we may be able to search for the elusive clarity of the old words erased from these maps.