This essay is about an object that no longer exists. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala was a painted cotton cloth, 2 metres wide and 5 metres long. Created in the Central Mexican town of Tlaxcala around 1552, its surface was covered with dozens of complex scenes arranged in a seven by thirteen grid. Together, these vignettes (most headed with a brief alphabetic caption in Nahuatl) told how the Aztec empire was overthrown by the forces of a joint indigenous-European army. The authors of the Lienzo, the Tlaxcalans, had been enemies of the Aztecs since prehispanic times, and so when Hernán Cortés and his soldiers reached Tlaxcala in August 1519, a military alliance was quickly formed. The Lienzo, in other words, was an account of the ‘Conquest of Mexico’from a Native American point of view. Unfortunately, the physical cloth is now lost. It disappeared during the French invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. But before it vanished, tracings were made of its imagery. These were used to print a set of fragmented lithographs in 1892. 1 From these lithographs (the tracings themselves are now lost) I have digitally reconstructed the visual form of the original document (see Parergon, plate 1). 2 Paradoxically, even though this object no longer exists, its reconstruction provides us with an extremely rich touchstone–as it were–for thinking about issues of materiality, iconography, cleverness, and the structures of Native American history-writing.