DECM 16th Century Gazetteer

The DECM Historical Gazetteer is a digital gazetteer of historical places in Mexico available in different formats and built from detailed research. This includes a 16th century version (The DECM 16th Century Gazetteer) with the toponyms mentioned in primary sources including the Relaciones Geográficas (1577-1585) and the Suma de Visitas de los Pueblos de la Nueva España (1548-1550), as well as information on the political, religious and administrative units of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The gazetteer is composed of 71 main files with geographic information of colonial provinces, alcaldias, corregimientos, diocesis, among many others, as well as thousands of historical cities, towns, villages, and other places. This is integrated in an interoperable model containing thousands of historical locations with alternative spelling place-name variations. The dataset also includes 30 tables with additional historical information related to toponyms, languages, repositories, maps, etc.

There are two versions of the DECM Historical Gazetteer: 1) The DECM Gazetteer, and 2) The DECM_16thC_Gazetteer.

This is the 16th Century DECM Gazetteer. This version constitutes a subset of the main DECM Historical Gazetteer, including only the toponyms that were mentioned in the the Suma de Visita de los Pueblos and the RG reports, providing a precise window into the period when these were recorded (1548-1550/1577-1585). This dataset contains: the toponyms with coordinates, mentioned and disambiguated for each RG volume and the Suma; plus, the 30 geographical layers and 32 tables as explained above, as well as the DECM Gazetteer Registry.

Content:

1. DECM_16thCentury_Gazetteer_RGs: Contains 11 shapefiles (points) with historical geographies. They have 
been created identifying all the toponyms mentioned in the historical documents within the edited volumes of the 
Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España and Yucatán published by Acuña, De la Garza, and the Suma de Visita de 
los Pueblos by Del Paso y Troncoso (see sources used) disambiguated and atomized in a spatial database. Each shapefile include the following attributes: ID, Place name, Alternative Names, Modern Name, References, Location, Confidence Degree, ID of a related location, Relationship shared, Location Type, Type Thesaurus URL, Coord X, Coord Y, Time spam URL, Start date, End date. Every shapefile 
includes 
metadata.

2. DECM_Additional_Information: Contains 49 shapefiles (points and polygons) with additional information on historical 
geographies. They have been created by digitising historical studies on 16th century Colonial History of Mexico.

3. DECM_Tables: Cointains 2 folders with additional tabular data with relevant information about 16th century colonial 
Mexico in two formats: csv and xlsx.

4. Documents:

a) DECM_Gazetteer_Disambiguation_Percentage.xlsx - Excel document with the total amount of toponyms included 
in the primary and secondary sources used, the number and percentage of places disambiguated where X and Y coordinates 
were assigned or not found. 

b) Souces_for_the_Disambiguation - Text file with the bibliographical references used to locate the 
place names in the DECM_Gazetteer_primarysources folder.