The scroll also describes ritual treasury caches dedicated to specific gods.
"These caches were also used to finance activities like warfare," said Fisher, who has submitted a report describing his as yet unpublished research to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Toward the end of the island's Tarascan occupation, the area was a "ritual center" where people of elite status lived and worked, he added.
The team identified a colonial-era chapel from the early 1500s, built in the first 20 years of the Spanish conquest.
Evidence of crop cultivation also suggests that humans continuously occupied the site for 2,000 years, Fisher said.
The entire island was covered in agricultural terraces, possibly to grow agave.
People created the terraces by digging sections of land about 6.6 feet (2 meters) wide, with earthen walls and a ditch on either side.
Filling in Gaps
"The discovery fills in gaps in the Lake Pátzcuaro basin's chronology," said Helen Perlstein Pollard, professor of anthropology at Michigan State University who has worked with Fisher in Mexico's Tarascan region.
"He discovered the basic sequence of occupation, the repeated use of this island over time, and the way the use of the island has shifted over time," Perlstein Pollard said.
Now, archaeologists can begin to examine the relationship between settlement patterns and the economic and political structures on the islands.
"We can now begin to ask the interesting questions," she said.
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