Trail of Footprints is a study of what seems to be fifty-eight maps created in Oaxaca, Mexico, from the late sixteenth century through the early eighteenth century. (Add up table 1.1, on page 3, and see the reference to “five dozen maps” on page 80.) Most of these maps are now in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN, Mexico City), although a few Oaxacan relaciones geográficas maps in the Bettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (University of Texas at Austin) are also discussed, as well as one map each from the Mapoteca Orozco y Berra (Mexico City) and the town of Santa María Atzompa (a document stolen in 2008). For almost all of these visual records, accompanying alphabetic records survive, and this archive (usually legal) often allows Hidalgo to reconstruct why specific maps were made, and how they were put to use throughout their subsequent social lives.

An introduction on Oaxacan history and historiography is followed by four main chapters. Chapter 1, “Patrons,” considers the types of people who commissioned maps, and focuses on a decade-spanning seventeenth-century legal battle over disputed lands near Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán—a dispute that in 1686 led indigenous residents to suggest to the Spanish alcalde that a copy of an old map be made and thus mobilized in litigations. Chapter 2, “Painters,” addresses the often-challenging question of who made maps, and how mapmaking related to Mesoamerican and European cartographic traditions. Cartographers seldom signed their maps; does a gloss saying that a map was “made by order of his lordship . . . Don Domingo de Mendoza” mean we should consider Mendoza as the effective creator (38)? Style can also be a guide to authorship, and the most discussed cartographer in this chapter is given the name “painter of Tehuantepec”; distinctive rooftops and (in earlier works) footprints lead Hidalgo to attribute a dozen maps to his hand (41).

Chapter 3, “Materials,” is faced with a dilemma. As noted in the introduction, when UNESCO granted Memory of the World status to the AGN maps in 2011, they were removed from circulation (digital files must now be consulted instead). Although a number of early modern Mesoamerican manuscripts have been submitted to non-invasive materials analysis (most famously, the Florentine Codex), such analysis has not yet, apparently, been extended to the maps under discussion, and so Hidalgo must rely on general discussions of pigments from the Florentine Codex and the writings of sixteenth-century protomédico Francisco Hernández, as well as ink recipes in Europe and general scholarship on Mesoamerican and European papers, cloths, and parchments. But sometimes the materials themselves leave their own identification signatures, as when iron-gall ink corrodes holes through its paper support (73). Chapter 4, “Authentication,” turns to the legalizing alphabetic annotations made on maps once they were submitted to viceregal authorities as evidence. Finally, the epilogue shifts gears to consider the vast collection of Mesoamerican manuscripts confiscated from Milanese traveler Lorenzo Boturini in 1743, and highlights one of Boturini's indigenous collaborators, Zapotec cacique Patricio Antonio López.

Hidalgo notes that his own project is an extension and expansion of Barbara Mundy's classic study of indigenous mapmaking in the sixteenth century: The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (1996). One of the pages I wish Hidalgo had borrowed from Mundy is an appendix listing all the maps studied in his project, indicating their current location, material support, scale, and, above all, attributed artist. (Mundy's own book focused on sixty-nine maps, so the two projects are in this sense quite parallel.) As mentioned previously, Hidalgo uses style to propose identifications for a number of artists, but apart from the aforementioned “painter of Tehuantepec,” and, more briefly, the “painter of ribbed mountains” (65–66), the identifying stylistic traits and groups of maps attributable to specific hands are left unclear—for example, the “painter of turquoise landscapes” (75) or the “painter of circular landscapes” (85). A number of the book's illustrations bring together collages of comparative details, such as animals (43) and celestial bodies (55). Similar compilations of telltale stylistic signatures for each proposed artist would have been useful.

To conclude, since this is a review for the Renaissance Quarterly, one can see the book itself as a map of popular themes in present-day scholarship on early modernity. Oaxacan maps, we read, are connected to the creation of new epistemology (2); indigenous knowledge in the natural sciences (5); fieldwork and experimentation (12, 36); Atlantic, transatlantic, and Pacific worlds (18, 63); the laboratory of botanical knowledge (62); Pamela Long's work on craft knowledge in Europe (78); and Airane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset's research on European cultures of recycling in the long eighteenth century (84).