The vault and the stonemason's iron: Nahua masons and the first bóvedas of New Spain

Two Franciscan chronicles record the one building technique Mesoamerican masons had not had — the masonry vault — arriving with a mason from Castile at the old church of San Francisco in Mexico City, and indigenous masons building two vaulted chapels unaided at Tlaxcala soon after. The same pages record what the buildings cost the people who raised them: at Santiago Tlatelolco, a ninety-thousand-peso church whose masons, bricklayers and labourers worked for nothing.