Why are Aztec cities interesting?

I excavate Aztec cities for a living. At the drop of a hat I can go on and on about Aztec cities, describing all kinds of details only a few people in the world would care to hear about. I've written a book on the subject, Aztec City-State Capitals. Here, I want to discuss three things that are interesting about Aztec cities:

1. Aztec cities were expressions of their political context.
2. Aztec rural and urban life were remarkably similar.
3. Urban agriculture was the norm in Aztec cities.

 

Aztec cities were expressions of their political context.

Tenochtitlan

This theme follows from my previous post, The power of the state to remake cities.  Most cities before the modern era were political capitals. This was certainly true for the Aztecs, Mayas, and other groups in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The biggest and most prosperous Aztec city--by far--was the imperial capital Tenochtitlan (now called Mexico City). Its size and opulence were direct consequences of the success of the Aztec Empire in: (1) conquering foreign peopless and getting them to pay taxes, and, (2) promoting commerce throughout Mesoamerica. Tenochtitlan is BY FAR the most extensively documented Aztec city, thanks both to a rich historical record and to the spectacular results of recent excavations at the main temple, the "Templo Mayor."

Teopanzolco (City-state capital)

But Tenochtitlan was the most atypical Aztec city. Compared to its 150,000-200,000 residents, the median Aztec city covered just one square km, with 5,000 people. These were the capitals of city-states, the dominant Aztec political form. While the empire gets all the publicity, the city-state was the active government for nearly all of the Aztec people. This is where people went to market, paid their taxes, socialized and married their spouses. The capitals of Aztec city-states reflected their small size and the limited powers of their kings. Their main pyramids were dwarfed by Tenochtitlan's Templo Mayor, their royal palace was a pale reflection of Motecuhzoma's palace in Tenochtitlan, their weekly market was a puny affair compared to the central imperial marketplace at Tlatelolco, and their level of opulence and prosperity was much lower than Tenochtitlan. But these WERE the capitals of

Acozac (City-state capital)

semi-independent governments, and their kings did have power over the local domain. So they all had some good-sized pyramids, a big public plaza, a distinctive royal palace, and other markers of urban political status.

Aztec rural and urban life were very similar

Rural house

I began my career excavating Aztec rural sites. When I started out, a fresh PhD in 1985, I expected that rural provincial sites would be poor and isolated, and that their residents would be downtrodden because they were exploited and dominated by the empire. Boy, was I wrong! I found that Aztec peasants were prosperous and successful, and their communities wealthy and resilient. I am now writing a book about these excavations. The residents had ready access to imported goods from all over Mesoamerica, they produced a steady stream of cotton textiles at home (which served as a form of money), and there were other signals of wealth and complexity. I published an article using the concept of "rural complexity" to describe my findings. In a number of ways, these rural Aztec villages were very "urban-like" in their complexity.

Then I excavated houses at an urban site, Yautepec. At first I thought that since the rural peasants had been very prosperous and well-connected, the urbanites would be fabulously wealthy and very different from their rural cousins. Wrong again! The urban households were almost impossible to

Urban house

distinguish from the rural households. Small, one-room houses built of adobe bricks were the norm in both settings. The basic domestic artifact assemblages were almost identical (same kinds of cookware, serving ware, obsidian tools, ritual items, craft objects, and so on). Each area had its own distinctive style of painted pottery, but painted bowls and jars were abundant in both settings. The same exotic imported goods were present in the middens of both contexts (bronze tools and

Serving ware, rural & urban

ornaments, greenstone beads, etc.). Surprisingly, population density was the same in both contexts (about 50 persons per hectare). So after excavating urban-looking villages, I then found a rural-looking city. Yes, the fact that Yautepec had a royal palace and some big pyramids made a difference. But for people's everyday lives, there was just not much to distinguish the rural and urban sites.

Urban fields, Tenochtitlan

Urban agriculture was the norm in Aztec cities

In every case where archaeologists have looked specifically for evidence of agricultural production within a city, they have found it. In Yautepec, people had both home gardens and irrigated fields. In Calixtlahuaca (my present excavation) and a series of Aztec cities in the Teotihuacan Valley, agricultural terraces were abundant within the city limits. Tenochtitlan, Xochimilco, Xaltocan, and other cities in and around the lakes in the Basin of Mexico all contained raised fields (chinampas) as part of the urban landscape. At Otumba, people grew maguey plants, both for their products (fiber and sap) and as stabilizers for terrace fields.

Urban fields in Zinacantepec

I have already written a post on Aztec urban agriculture, so I won't say much more here. For a more technical treatment, see Isendahl and Smith (2013).

The larger context of Aztec cities

Some of the features of Aztec cities go against the grain of both popular and scholarly thought on urbanism. Cities are supposed to be radically different places to live than the countryside. Open any urban textbook and you will read about this.  Urban agriculture is supposed to be something new and different. Well, there is a lot of variation in cities across space and time. Our current western pattern of urbanization is not the only urban trajectory, and premodern city traditions like the Aztec may be able to give us some new ideas or options to think about as we face the future of the Wide Urban World.

Isendahl, Christian, and Michael E. Smith    2013    Sustainable Agrarian Urbanism: The Low-Density Cities of the Mayas and Aztecs. Cities 30 (in press).

Matos Moctezuma, Eduardo    1988    The Great Temple of the Aztecs. Thames and Hudson, New York.

Rojas, José Luis de    2012    Tenochtitlan: Capital of the Aztec Empire. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Smith, Michael E.
    2008    Aztec City-State Capitals. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

    2012    The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

    n.d.    The Archaeology of Aztec Families and Communities. Book in preparation.

Aztec Urban Agriculture

Chinampa farming in Tenochtitlan

Urban agriculture is a hot topic right now, but it's nothing new. The Aztecs were doing this 600 years ago. Today, the cultivation of crops within cities is expanding all over the world. This practice is being promoted by city administrations, by planners, and by grassroots organizations. Urban agriculture provides food for urban residents; the food is fresh; and the maintenance of green areas has health benefits. This practice is being touted as a positive force in creating more sustainable cities.

The growth of urban agriculture is also the target of a rapidly growing scholarly literature. Agronomists are studying the soil nutrients of urban agriculture, engineers are looking at water supplies, anthropologists and sociologists are examining the social aspects of urban farming. This research targets both developing countries and the developed world.

What people don't seem to realize is that urban agriculture was quite extensive in ancient cities. Although a few writers acknowledge that ancient societies practiced urban agriculture, they view it as in isolated and rare practice limited to a few isolated places. Most writers about modern cities, of course, just ignore deep history. To them, urban agriculture is something new, a product of the sustainability movement. For example, the "Solutions" website wrote in November 2010 that urban agriculture is "a new movement."

In fact, urban agriculture was a "new movement" several thousand years ago.  The history of ancient urban agriculture has yet to be written, but there are some good archaeological and historical examples from the area where I do fieldwork, ancient Mesoamerica. Swedish archaeologist Christian Isendahl (2010) performed chemical analysis of ancient soils to show that the ancient Maya grew crops within their low-density cities. Calixtlahuaca, the Aztec-period urban site where I am working now, was a giant cultivated hillside; people built stone terraces for their houses and for gardens. But the most spectacular example of ancient urban agriculture in Mesoamerica was the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.

Tenochtitlan, the island capital

Urban agriculture at Tenochtitlan is not a new discovery. It was known to Europeans from the time Hernando Cortés and his band of Spanish soldiers entered the Aztec capital in 1519. They remarked on the many green areas devoted to farming. The famous Aztec chinampas (often incorrectly called "floating gardens) covered many acres of the city. Built on a island in a large lake, Tenochtitlan was crossed by many canals. Indeed, the Spaniards called it "the Venice of the New World."

The chinampas are a remarkable form of agriculture. They were very intensively cultivated, with three to four crops a year. The chinampas are an example of a more widespread farming system called raised fields. This was a system of farming in swamps or shallow lakes. Soil was scooped up from the lake bottom and piled onto long parallel rows. The fields were sometimes held in place with trees or wood stakes. Crops planted on top of the rows had easy access to water, and the soils were very rich. Periodically the canals between the fields were cleaned out and the muck piled on top of the field (a process known as "mucking"). This material was rich in decaying organic material, a great natural fertilizer.

Aztec map of a chinampa area

Raised fields were devised a thousand years or more before the Aztecs in lowland Mesoamerica, and the system was  used by the Classic Maya (AD 0-800). In South America, raised fields were invented independently, and large systems were built in the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia, and around the edges of Lake Titicaca between Bolivia and Peru.

By the time Tenochtitlan was founded (AD 1325), this was an ancient agricultural method in Mesoamerica, although rare in the highlands. The Mexica people founded their city in the shallow waters of Late Texcoco. As the city expanded, vast areas of chinampas were constructed at the city edges.The island was located in an area where the salty waters of Lake Texcoco met the fresh waters of Lake  Xochimilco in the south. When Tenochtitlan grew large, a system of dikes was built to keep the salty waters away from the city (and to control flooding).

Urban chinampa fields in Tenochtitl

A remarkable Aztec map (black-and-white figure at right) shows one area of Tenochtitlan with large canals and footpaths, blocks of parallel chinampas, and the houses of farmers. Soon after the Spanish conquest, the Aztec peoples started using the machinery of the Spanish legal system, including written wills. These chinampa farmers left
their houses and fields to their descendents, and the wills often contain maps of their holdings. The next figure shows some of these drawings, compiled from such wills by ethnohistorian Edward Calnek. Most farmers owned two or three fields, located adjacent to their houses. As shown by the painting of Tenochtitlan at the top of this entry, the Aztec capital (with its 100,000+ inhabitants) was ringed with chinampas.

In addition to Tenochtitlan, Lakes Xochimilco and Chalco (south of the city) were covered with chinampas in Aztec times. Although this system was highly productive, it met only a portion of the food needs of the imperial capital. Food was also obtained through the markets and through taxes.

Chinampero in 1900

After the Spanish conquest, Tenochtitlan became Mexico City. Lake Texcoco was drained and the chinampas no longer functioned. In Lake Xochimilco, however, the chinampas continued to be farmed in the colonial period and are still active today, growing flowers and vegetables for the Mexico City market.

Tourist boats at the "floating gardens"

The chinampero (chinampa farmer) in this great 1900 photograph (from the 3rd edition of my book, The Aztecs) is using a flat-bottom canoe of the type used by his Aztec ancestors. Today, the Lake Xochimilco chinampas are a tourist attraction. You can ride in a larger version of these canoes and see the fields up close, and you can even be serenaded by a mariachi band in a boat (for a fee). For tourists, the chinampas are called "floating gardens." These fields obviously do not float. That label probably comes from the practice of using floating rafts for germinating the plants, which are then transplanted into the chinampa surface.

Urban fields in Zinacantepec, 1579

The chinampas of Tenochtitlan are one of the more spectacular examples of ancient urban agriculture, but they are far from unique in the Aztec world. An early colonial map from Zinacantepec ("place [or hill] of the bat"), shows fields and houses in and around the town. Zinacantepec, located near Toluca and Calixtlahuaca, was a city-state prior to the Spanish conquest. This early map probably preserves much of the ancient settlement pattern (with the addition of a Christian church). Look closely at the nine houses surrounding the church. This was the downtown area of the town, and the artist had painted much of the area between the houses in green, indicating cultivated fields (the green is faint, but clearly present in this part of the map).

Medieval urban herb garden

A search of ancient and premodern cities in other parts of the world would no doubt turn up many other examples of urban agriculture. Just this morning I just found a great color illustration of a Medieval urban herb garden from a 15th century French manuscript.

When writers today call urban agriculture a "new movement," they are in error. But I am less interested in correcting such errors than in bringing to light a whole world of urban possibilities that existed in past times. The more we know about the past, the better we will be able to plan for the future. Look at the quotation from Winston Churchill in the top right corner of this blog: "The farther back we look, the farther ahead we can see." Or, in the words, of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, “It’s very hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

Here are some sources on the Aztec chinampas. The first complete and scholarly book on the city of Tenochtitlan to be published in English is now in press (Rojas 2012); it has much good information on chinampas and other features of the island city.

Ávila López, Raúl
1991    Chinampas de Iztapalapa, D.F. Colección Científica, vol. 225. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

Calnek, Edward E.
1973    The Localization of the Sixteenth Century Map Called the Maguey Plan. American Antiquity 38:190-195.

2003    Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco: The Natural History of a City / Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco: La Historia Natural de una Ciudad. In El urbanismo en mesoamérica / Urbanism in Mesoamerica, edited by William T. Sanders, Alba Guadalupe Mastache, and Robert H. Cobean, pp. 149-202. Proyecto Urbanismo dn Mesoamérica / The Mesoamerican Urbanism Project, vol. 1. Pennsylvania State University and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, University Park and Mexico City.

Rojas, José Luis de
2012    Tenochtitlan: Capital City of the Aztec Empire. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. In press,

Smith, Michael E.
2012    The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

For more context on urban agriculture see:

Boone, Christopher G. and Ali Modarres
2006    City and Environment. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Isendahl, Christian
2010    Greening the Ancient City: The Agro-Urban Landscapes of the Pre-Hispanic Maya. In The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics, edited by Paul Sinclair, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend, and Christian Isendahl, pp. 527-552. Studies in Global Archaeology, vol. 15. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala.

Ljungkvist, John, Stephan Barthel, Göran Finnveden, and Sverker Sörlin
2010    The Urban Anthropocene: Lessons for Sustainability From the Environmental History of Constantinople. In The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics, edited by Paul Sinclair, Gullög Nordquist, Frands Herschend, and Christian Isendahl, pp. 367-390. Studies in Global Archaeology, vol. 15. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Uppsala.