Principal English Translation:
a bower; can refer to a building covered with bowers or branches (see Karttunen); possibly also a house or building covered with green or blue materials, possibly turquoise? (see below)
Frances Karttunen:
XIUHCAL-LI bower / casa enramada (Z) [(2)Zp.52,228]. One of the attestations has the vowel of the first syllable marked long. See XIHUI-TL, CAL-LI.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 326.
Attestations from sources in English:
"Casa de turquesa" is the literal translation, but it also seems to mean "las casas pajizas de los chichimecas." The building is painted on folio 26 verso of the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca. (sixteenth century, Quauhtinchan)
Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, eds. Paul Kirchhoff, Lina Odena Güemes, y Luis Reyes García (México: CISINAH, INAH-SEP, 1976), 180.
Attestations from sources in Spanish:
motlali xiuhcali yhuan altar = se colocó una casa de turqueza y un altar (Tlaxcala, 1662–1692)
Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, Historia cronológica de la Noble Ciudad de Tlaxcala, transcripción paleográfica, traducción, presentación y notas por Luis Reyes García y Andrea Martínez Baracs (Tlaxcala and México: Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, Secretaría de Extensión Universitaria y Difusión Cultural, y Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1995), 460–461.