At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life

"The Templo Mayor deals with the emperor, the high priests and the elite of Aztec society. But what about commoners? What about everyday life and regular people? They’re not well represented in the written sources. There’s a little bit of information in Duran and the Codex Mendoza and Lockhart’s documents, but to really see what life was like for the 99% in Aztec society, you need archaeology. I have spent most of my career excavating houses, workshops and agricultural fields in provincial areas that were conquered by the Aztec Empire, in order to reconstruct what life was like. At Home with the Aztecs is a synthesis of several decades of excavation. I also went on courses to learn how to write in a narrative fashion because I wanted to write for a general audience, which is very different from academic writing. I learned to do that and the book won best popular book in archaeology in 2017 from the Society for American Archaeology . There was a lot of ritual on the domestic level. People performed a lot of little ceremonies in their homes. We find little ceramic figurines and various goods that were used ceremonially. Women were curers. We’ve found musical instruments, flutes, whistles and rattles. Before my excavations, scholars thought musical instruments were only found in offerings in places like the Templo Mayor. I was in touch with an expert in Aztec music and explained that I had found these things in trash deposits and commoner households. He thought I must have been mistaken, but I showed them to him. He was very excited and came over to Mexico to explore my findings. The Aztecs had a rich domestic life, rich in domestic ritual. It is also interesting that rural and urban households were very well connected and there were common styles throughout the empire. We were surprised to find these long, thin pieces of metal that, at first, looked like copper wire. I thought they couldn’t be copper wire, or if they were, they must be from after the Aztec conquest. It turned out they were bronze sewing needles. Scholars had found out that the Aztecs and other peoples of Mesoamerica did know bronze technology with alloys of copper and arsenic or tin. I was very surprised to see bronze objects showing up in farmers’ households in the Aztec Empire. It shows that they were well connected in trade networks, and were doing pretty well economically. That was a surprising find."