The 16th Century Merchant Community of Santa Maria Acxotla, Puebla

Summary

Although merchants were an important component of the prehispanic and post-conquest landscape, not much is known about the internal organization of merchant groups and the structure of their respective communities. This paper examines the size, composition, and internal organization of the small merchant community of Santa Maria Acxotla located in the Puebla-Tlaxcala basin of highland Mexico. Census data collected 39 years after the conquest suggests that specialized merchant communities operated relatively unchanged well into the 16th century. The information from Santa Maria Acxotla is summarized and compared to the Aztec period site of Otumba, Mexico that is known to have contained a pochteca merchant community in the Basin of Mexico. The data from Santa Maria Acxotla provide new data on how merchant communities may have been organized prior to Spanish Conquest.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Aztecs and their World: Initerdisciplinary Contributions of Frances Berdan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage