Everyday Life in the Aztec World

This book offers views of Aztec lives and their interactions in rituals, markets, courts, and on the battlefield.

Frances F. Berdan (Author), Michael E. Smith (Author)

9780521516365, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 December 2020

288 pages, 85 b/w illus. 4 maps
23.4 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.58 kg

'A vast amount of sociocultural information is cleverly interwoven in this carefully crafted narrative …' C. C. Kolb, Choice

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

Part I. Lives: 1. The Emperor
2. The priest
3. The featherworker
4. The merchant
5. The farmer
6. The slave
Part II. Intersecting Lives: 7. A child is born
8. Marketday in Tlatelolco
9. Judgement day
10. A battle far afield
Epilogue
Glossary
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA], Archaeology by period / region [HDD], History of the Americas [HBJK]