Little black footprints track across the map drawn on worn fig-bark paper, marking the land boundaries in an ancient Mexican village.

The map is part of a group of documents, known collectively as Techialoyan manuscripts, created in the 1700s by indigenous people as evidence for land ownership court cases against the Spanish government. A hand-painted book details similar claims nearby.

Incredibly rare and fragile, they are rarely on view. But they are on display now, a centerpiece among 50 items chosen to tell the story of globalization from 1400 to 1800 in a new Penn Libraries exhibit at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts​​​​​​​.

Featuring many treasures from Penn and the Jay I. Kislak Foundation private collection, “Expanding Earth: Travel, Encounter, and Exchange” is featured in the sixth-floor gallery of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center through May 19.

The exhibit goes hand-in-hand with the 2017 Jay I. Kislak Conference, “To the Ends of the Earth,” which will be held Thursday, March 2, through Saturday, March 4, at Van-Pelt Library. New York University professor Michael A. Gomez, a leading scholar of Africa and the African diaspora, will be the keynote speaker.

The conference will feature “emerging scholarship on what it means to travel and encounter new things,” says Mitch Fraas, Penn Kislak Center’s special collections curator. “The story-based approach will dovetail nicely with the new exhibit.”

Each one of the exhibit’s manuscripts, printed books, drawings, maps, and artifacts tells a story about the movements of peoples, ideas, and goods across the world during those critical centuries of exploration.

“We had to think about how to represent early global encounters, a subject so massive, in a limited space,” Fraas says. “We decided to present an array of items and stories that might challenge accepted ideas of how global or insular the world was during that period.” 

Kislak, a Penn alum, and his foundation’s librarian worked with Fraas to choose the items that would work well with those from Penn’s collection.

“A lot of the material has not been on display before,” Fraas says. “It’s great to bring things out of the stacks, especially items not seen before, that fit with the theme and are new to people and will get them thinking.”

One of the favorites from the foundation is a striking watercolor from 1529 of two Aztec ball players, drawn from life. The ball players were taken by Cortez after his conquest and brought back to Spain, along with a retinue of Aztec nobles and courtiers, and performed for the Emperor Charles V.

“It is truly remarkable,” says Fraas, noting that many drawings of indigenous people during that period are fantastical, based on imagination instead of real life. 

The exhibit spans the world. Items on display include the first map of Africa from 1508 showing it surrounded by water; a detailed translation of European ship drawings by Japanese artists in 1808 on a large scroll; the first printed work in English from an Indian author; and documents all signed the same day in 1555, in Lima, Peru, detailing two people of African descent buying their freedom.

A treasure from the United States is a 1783 book of hand-written receipts of goods bought from Chinese merchants kept by John Green of Philadelphia, including one for Benjamin Franklin.

“It’s an impressive document of very early post-independence global trade,” Fraas says.

The story behind the Techialoyan map of the Mexican village has a fascinating twist. Among only about 50 that survive, they show how indigenous communities came to understand how the Spanish colonial system worked. The maps and written evidence were created in the 1700s, but purported to be from the 1500s, documentary proof needed to support their land claims in court.

“They are forgeries in the sense that they are not what they claim to be,” Fraas says, “but as historical forgeries they are of great interest.”