Previous Material Entanglements and the Rise of the Aztec Empire

Summary

Precisely dated household middens at the Aztec site of Xaltocan suggest that Aztec imperial matter—decorated serving vessels imported from Tenochtitlan and small spindle whorls used to produce tribute cloth, for example—often predates imperial formation and expansion by nearly a century. In this paper, I consider the analytical purchase we might get in explaining this puzzling finding by considering literature from the material turn; Khatchadourian, Bauer, Kosiba, and others have recently offered useful frameworks for the politics of nonhuman things and beings, for example. I attempt to move away from traditional understandings of the archaeological visibility of the Aztec empire, which present imperial things as passive and inert, and as consequences of imperialism, but not as consequential for it. Instead, I reconstruct the flows of matter that later came to be known as Aztec imperial, or rather, the Aztec empire’s previous material entanglements. Acknowledging that objects, in their flows and in their presence, had effects that were not confined to the intentions of their makers and users, or to the moment of their production and use, I contemplate how these flows might have contributed to the later rise and rapid expansion of the Mexica.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21672