Aztec Studies

Abstract

Aztec culture provides a gateway to Mesoamerican studies because it represents the connecting point between the pre-Hispanic past and the globalized present. Current research on the Aztecs comes from several disciplines: anthropology, history, art history, religion, and literature. The nearly fifty articles on the Aztecs published by Ancient Mesoamerica since its inception in 1990 encompass the various branches of Aztec scholarship. In this article we discuss major themes in recent scholarship on the Aztecs: environment and subsistence, settlement and demography, economy, politics, and social relations, ideology and masterworks, and interregional relations.

CERAMIC ROOF ORNAMENTS (ALMENAS) FROM CIHUATAN, EL SALVADOR: CONTEXTS, DESCRIPTIONS, AND INFERENCES FROM OTHER SITES

“…Evans (Susan T. Evans, personal communication 2012) points out that while the Late Postclassic Tlaxcallans may have used almenas , they did not use the disk motif to indicate a palace, as appears to be the case elsewhere in the Basin of Mexico. Almenas were neither discussed in Evans's (2004) review of Aztec palaces, nor in a more recent paper by Nichols and Evans (2009). Evans (Susan T. Evans, personal communication 2012) reports, however, that thick, flat ceramic fragments from excavations at the Mexican site of Cihuatepec “should be reassessed” with the possibility that they represent almenas (Evans 1988, 1989).…”

Rethinking Huitzilopochtli's Conquest: Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, Social Theory, and the Aztecs of Mexico

“…These research programs rested on post-W.W. II intellectual shifts in archaeology. The materialism championed by Pedro Armillas (1948) expanded Mexican archaeology from a focus on monumentality; cultural ecology and neo-evolutionary theory theoretically framed the Basin of Mexico settlement pattern project that provided a regional perspective on urbanism, stratification, agricultural intensification, and state formation (Nichols 1994:267–268; Nichols and Evans 2009:267; Sanders et al 1979:359–418). This work included excavations of agricultural features and in the Teotihuacan Valley excavations of both prehispanic and colonial houses, prefiguring the development of household archaeology (e.g., Armillas 1971; Charlton 1972; Parsons 1991; Sanders et al 1979:221–358).…”

“…This led her to explore how the politics of the imperial expansion of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco restructured the economies of city-states in the core of the Basin of Mexico—published first in an article in Current Anthropology followed by articles in American Anthropologist (Brumfiel 1980, 1983, 1987a). Subsequent investigations at other Aztec sites by Liz and other archaeologists have provided a broader and less normative view of Aztec urbanism and political economy (Nichols 1994, 2004:274–278; Nichols and Evans 2009; Smith 2008).…”