This article presents archaeological data on Late Postclassic long-distance trade in central and northern Mesoamerica. A~t e c trade goods from the Basin of Mexico (ceramics and obsidian) are widespread, while imports from other areas are much less common, both in the Basin of Mexico and elsewhere. The artifactual data signal a high volume of exchange in the Late Postclassic, and while trade was spatially nucleated around the Basin of Mexico, most exchange activity was apparently not under strong political control. The archaeological findings are compared with ethnohistoric sources to further our knowledge of the mechanisms of exchange, the effect of elite consumption on trade, and the relationship between trade and imperialism.Ethnohistory makes it clear that long-distance trade was an important institution in Aztec society. Exotic goods from all over hlesoamerica were offered for sale in the Tenochtitlan marketplace, the professional pochteca merchants traded extensively both inside and outside of the Aztec empire, trade was closely linked to Aztec imperialism, and exotic luxury items played crucial sociopolitical roles in Aztec society (see, for example, Berdan 1978Berdan , 1982Berdan , 1987b. But what are the material manifestations of this extensive and culturally important system of exchange? In spite of numerous methodological and conceptual advances in the archaeological analysis of prehistoric trade and trade goods (e.g., Earle and Ericson 1977; Hirth 1984;Nelson 1985;Zeitlin 1982), archaeology has so far made almost no contribution to our knowledge of Aztec trade. A recent review of archaeological studies of the Aztec economy (Smith 1987d) was able to include little discussion of long-distance trade, and recent treatments of Late Postclassic exchange by archaeologists (e.g., Drennan 1984a; Sanders and Santley 1983) rely upon ethnohistory, quantitative reconstructions, and comparisons with earlier periods, avoiding any discussion of archaeological evidence for Late Postclassic exchange.There are two reasons for the lack of attention to material evidence for Aztec trade: (I) the existing data are widely scattered, much of it in obscure publications; and (2) most of the evidence is of poor quality, consisting simply of statements that particular trade goods were found at a site. This article assembles much of the scattered evidence for Aztec long-distance exchange in order to see what it can tell us about Late Postclassic economics. While a general lack of contextual data for individual finds hampers interpretation of the socioeconomic significance of trade goods, sufficient information is available to make a number of inferences about Aztec trade that go beyond the data available from ethnohistory.My emphasis here is on the archaeological evidence for Aztec long-distance trade, and I make rather limited use of the abundant ethnohistoric data on Aztec exchange.
