Until the age of 15, nearly all training was carried out in the home by the parents. The Codex Mendoza shows women teaching their daughters to spin, to weave, to sweep, and to cook and prepare food (see figures 2fi, 3fi). Fathers are depicted instructing their sons in a variety of tasks including fishing, carrying, and marketing. In another part of the Codex, skilled craftsmen instruct their sons in their work (see figure 4.9).
School
All boys and girls attended school at some point between 10 and 20 years of age. There were two types of school: the telpochcalli (“youth's house”) for commoners and the calmecac for nobles and exceptional commoners.7 A telpochcalli was located in every town, and large cities had many, one in every calpolli (neighborhood). All commoner boys attended these schools, where they lived under spartan conditions. Girls also attended, but we do not know whether they lived on the premises. Instruction was carried out separately for boys and girls. All of the students received training in singing, dancing, and musical instruments, mostly for rituals.
Young men worked on civic projects, from carrying firewood for the temples to repairing temples, roads, and bridges. The major focus of male education in the telpochcalli, however, was military training. Seasoned warriors instructed the youths in martial arts, and then the students went off to war for practical training. At first they assisted by carrying baggage and arms for soldiers; later the novices carried their own arms. Eventually, they were allowed to participate fully in battle and to attempt to capture enemy prisoners for sacrifice.
The calmecac, a more exclusive school, was attended by nobles and the most promising commoner youths. These schools, each associated with a major temple, provided training for future leaders in government, the priesthood, and the military. Self-control, discipline, and obedience were stressed in the live-in calmecac. According to Friar Durán, instruction covered a wide variety of subjects: “all the arts: military, religious, mechanical, and astrological, which gave them knowledge of the stars. For this they possessed large, beautiful books, painted in hieroglyphics, dealing with all these arts [and these books] were used for teaching.”8
Military and religious arts were the most important subjects at the calmecac. The younger students trained as novice priests, and their duties included sweeping, gathering decorative boughs and sacrificial maguey thorns, and helping the head priests with offerings of incense, sacrifices, musical performances, and astronomical observations. As students advanced, they also trained for battle, much like the students in the telpochcalli, and they eventually advanced to the level of full warriors.
Adult Life and Social Roles
Marriage
Young men married in the late teens or early twenties, but young women married much younger – often as early as 10 or 12 years old. When a young man's parents decided that he was ready to marry, they consulted with his teachers and with relatives to select an appropriate bride.9 An elderly female matchmaker approached the young woman's parents. If the negotiations were successful, the groom's family consulted soothsayers to determine an appropriate day for the ceremony. The soothsayer would find the best date by examining books painted with the 260-day ritual calendar and its omens. It was thought that a marriage celebrated on an unlucky day would not succeed.
Wedding ceremonies took place in two parts, beginning with an elaborate all-day feast at the bride's house. Her mother and female relatives worked for days to prepare tamales to feed the many people who would attend. The guests were served in a particular order, and each was given food, flowers, tobacco, and drink (cacao and pulque). At sunset the bride was bathed and clothed in a special outfit. She then received a lecture from the elders of the groom's family: “Forever now leave childishness, girlishness; no longer art thou to be like a child . . . Be most considerate of one; regard one with respect, speak well, greet one well. By night look to, take care of the sweeping, the laying of fire. Arise in the deep of night [to begin domestic tasks].”10
Following the speeches, the bride was carried by the groom's relatives to his house. Relatives of the couple accompanied the bride in a procession with torches. In the second part of the wedding ceremony, at the groom's house, the couple literally “tied the knot” (figure 6.2). In the words of the Codex Mendoza:
And when they arrived at the groom's house, the groom's parents led her to the patio of the house to receive her, and they put her in a room or house where the groom was waiting. And the bride and bridegroom sat on a mat with its seats, next to a burning hearth, and they tied their clothes together, and offered copal incense to their gods. And then two old men and two old women, who were present as witnesses, gave food to the bride and bridegroom, and then the elders ate.11
Figure 6.2 Aztec wedding ceremony. The bride and groom have tied their capes together to signal their union. Below them a feast is waiting, and on the sides older relatives are giving the young couple advice (Codex Mendoza 1992:v.4:127:f.61r)
The elders then gave advice to the newlyweds; this is shown by the speech scrolls in figure 6.2. After four days, another feast was held with food and drink, dancing, and exchanges of gifts between the new in-laws. Once married, young people assumed adult roles and responsibilities, and these varied tremendously depending upon one's social class, occupation, place of residence, and gender.
Gender roles
In daily life men typically worked outside the home, whereas the house was the domain of women. Most men were farmers who spent the day in their fields during the agricultural season (May through November, the central Mexican rainy season). During the rest of the year men were often away from home, fulfilling their service obligations, either as warriors (chapter 7) or as laborers. Artisans worked closer to home, in their house, yard, or a nearby workshop, often assisted by their families.
Women spent most of their time in and around the home. Their major activities were childrearing, cooking, housekeeping, domestic ritual, weaving and marketing.12 A woman's contributions to the household economy were considerable. Her textiles were needed to pay taxes and rent, and any extra cloth a woman made could be exchanged for other goods. She did the marketing for the family, buying the weekly necessities and selling the family's surplus food or craft products. Even noblewomen, who did not have to produce cloth to pay taxes or worry about bargains in the marketplace, spent much of their time spinning and weaving, for this was an important part of gender identity regardless of social class.
Commoner women spent much of their work time cooking and preparing food. Grinding corn for tortillas and tamales was the single biggest task. Before the advent of mechanical mills, modern Mesoamerican peasant women would spend five or six hours each day grinding corn for the family's meals. Aztec women must have spent a similar amount of time at the metate (grinding-stone). A woman's cooking duties often went beyond the needs of her immediate family. Her tamales and sauces were left as offerings at the temples (where they were eaten by the priests). She sometimes was required to provide food for the local lord, and she could be called upon to make tortillas and other provisions when her city-state's armies marched off to war.
Women had a more important role in domestic ritual than men. When a woman swept her house and yard with a broom every morning, she was doing more than simply cleaning her home. She was setting the world straight by purifying the domestic realm. Sweeping was also a crucial part of the rituals that priests carried out at the temples and the calmecac. The power of brooms thus linked women and priests in a common battle against the forces of disorder and darkness. Women also carried out other domestic rituals such as burning incense and maintaining the household altar.13
Social Classes
Nobles or lords composed only about 5 percent of the total Aztec population, but they were firmly in control of society.14 Unlike elites in more open societies, the position and privileges of the Aztec nobility were rigidly specified by law (an example is the reforms of Motecuhzoma I, p. ••• above). Such laws limited the use or consumption of key goods, such as
decorated capes, fancy jewelry, or two-story houses, to the nobility. Lords were further distinguished from commoners by birth, for membership in the nobility was strictly hereditary.
In practical terms, the power and wealth of the Aztec nobility rested on their control of land, labor, and taxes. All of the land in a city-state belonged ultimately to the tlatoani, but he granted estates to high lords called tetecuhtin (sing. tecuhtli) and to important temples. These estates were passed on to the descendants of the tecuhtli, or maintained in perpetuity by the temples. Below the rank of tecuhtli were the regular nobles, or pipiltin (sing. pilli). Most pipiltin served a tecuhtli or tlatoani, often residing in or around his palace.
To Aztec nobles, peasants and other commoners existed to serve them. Macehualli (pl. macehualtin), the term for commoner, means “subject,” but commoners varied in their degree of subjugation, from the heavy burdens of slaves to the relative freedom of the pochteca merchants. Most commoners, however, had a number of typical obligations to their lord, first and foremost of which was to provide him with regular payments in goods.15 These payments were assessed by family and consisted of cotton quachtli, food items, or specific goods produced by the family. Commoners also provided their lord with regular labor service. Men cultivated the lord's land, women spun and wove for him, and both sexes worked as domestic servants. Such duties typically rotated among the lord's subjects, with each family contributing several weeks of work each year. These payments of goods and labor, called tequitl, were the basic duties of nearly all commoners.
In addition to tequitl, commoners were called upon to serve nobles for various special activities. The Aztecs did not have a standing army, and troops were conscripted for each campaign. When a large project was carried out, such as the construction of a temple or canal system, commoners were called up in a labor draft for the occasion. Just how heavy were the obligations of commoners? The paucity of numerical data in documentary sources makes this a difficult question. We don't know how many days of labor were required each year, how many quachtli were owed, or how much time it took to produce them.16
Commoners
Peasants and the Calpolli
Peasants, like most other commoners, were organized in wards and calpolli groups. A calpolli was a group of families who lived near one another, were subject to a single lord, controlled a block of land, and often shared a common occupation.17 In urban settings, calpolli comprised neighborhoods, and many economic specialists such as merchants and artisans lived together in their own calpolli. In rural areas, Nahuatl-language written records used the term to describe two different sizes of settlement. A small calpolli, or ward, comprised a cluster of 10 to 20 houses, the families who lived in them, and their assigned agricultural land. The village of Capilco in Morelos, with its 21 simple houses (figure 3.7), was probably such a ward. The term calpolli was also used to denote a much larger grouping composed of several wards under a common tecuhtli lord. In some rural calpolli, the wards were spread widely over the landscape; in others they were clustered together to form a rural town. These settlements typically had a telpochcalli school for their youth, and many also had a temple, a market, and perhaps a ballcourt. Many calpolli in both urban and rural settings included wards.
Calpolli lands were farmed by the member households. In theory the governing council of the calpolli divided the land among the constituent families. In practice, however, individual plots were inherited informally from one generation to the next. If new land opened up, or if an existing plot was left abandoned, the calpolli council would reallocate the land. Rights of use for an individual plot could be sold, but the land remained under the general jurisdiction of the calpolli and altepetl (city-state). Ethnohistorian James Lockhart describes the situation as follows:
A land sale, then, was openly brought before the authorities, and a feast-like ritual accompanied the transfer like any other. Indeed, one way of looking at a transaction of this type is that the seller for a consideration relinquished his allocation from the altepetl/calpolli and permitted the authorities to reallocate it in the usual way to the buyer.18
The relationship between calpolli and the nobility varied by region. In the Valley of Mexico, Morelos and the Toluca area, many or most calpolli were under the jurisdiction of a noble, who held ultimate control of the calpolli land. Nobles lived in calpolli towns (see discussion of Cuexcomate below), and the resident commoners paid taxes or rents to their local noble (see discussion of the noble Molotecatl below). Nobles also held lands apart from calpolli, and peasants who worked these lands typically did not belong to a calpolli. These commoners were considered dependent upon their lord, perhaps in a fashion analogous to medieval European serfs. These dependent workers may not have had the same degree of control over their farm plots as calpolli members, although the situation is far from clear in the sources. In the eastern Nahua area of Puebla and Tlaxcala, the calpolli was not as important in rural social organization. Nobles in this area headed large teccalli, or noble houses, to which commoners were attached by obligations of service and rent. The nature of peasant life in this area is not as well understood.19
Rural Life
The site of Cuexcomate, with 135 simple houses, was probably a rural calpolli town.20 In addition to the peasant houses, Cuexcomate also had a small palace, a temple, a public plaza, and a special civil building that may have been a telpochcalli (figure 3.7). The Cuexcomate calpolli comprised three or four wards. Families at Cuexcomate and the nearby single-ward village of Capilco lived in small one-room houses with sun-dried mud-brick (adobe) walls and thatched roofs. All that remains of their houses today are the wall foundations and floors that were constructed of stone (figure 6.3). When in use, these houses probably looked much like modern adobe peasant houses (figure 6.4).
Figure 6.3 Wall foundations and floor of a peasant house excavated at Capilco (photograph by Michael E. Smith)
Figure 6.4 Modern adobe peasant house in the village of Tetlama, not far from Capilco (photograph by Michael E. Smith)
Nahuatl census records tell us that small houses such as these were home to either nuclear families or joint families that consisted of more than one married couple.21 In many areas, the average household size was five to six members, although, in some communities, the average size exceeded eight persons per household. Sometimes servants or other unrelated persons lived with a family. Many houses were arranged in small patio groups with two to five houses built around a common open courtyard (figure 3.7). Although the residents of a patio group often were related, perhaps as a multigeneration extended family, in other cases unrelated families lived together. The Nahuatl term for these units is cemithualtin, meaning “those in one yard.”
The houses at Capilco and Cuexcomate were so small that most domestic activity probably took place in the patio outside, which was kept clear of debris. People threw their trash to the sides and rear of the house, and the study of artifacts from these locations provides information about the activities and social conditions of the families who lived in each house. Broken potsherds from ceramic cookpots, storage jars, serving bowls, and tortilla griddles give abundant evidence for the preparation of meals by the women of Capilco and Cuexcomate. When pots broke, sherds accumulated around the house and yard. Friar Sahagún noted that Aztec babies “spend their time piling up earth and potsherds, those on the ground.”22 In addition to the tens of thousands of such sherds excavated from each house, obsidian blades and basalt grinding tools, such as the metate for maize, provide additional evidence for kitchen activities (obsidian and basalt tools were also used for other domestic activities, and in some cases were used for craft production). Every house excavated at these sites also yielded ceramic spindle whorls and spinning bowls, and many had bronze sewing needles. Several types of ritual artifacts were found at all houses, including figurines and incense burners.
Whereas women's activities – food preparation, textile manufacture, and domestic offerings – left abundant material evidence f
or archaeologists to find, men's work is almost invisible at these sites. Most of the men were probably farmers, but farm tools or other evidence of farming are rarely recovered in excavations of domestic contexts. Family members in some houses worked part-time making paper from tree bark (see chapter 11). This paper, used for both writing and rituals, was a major tax good paid by the inhabitants of Morelos to the Aztec Empire.
To judge from the nature of the artifacts found around each house, the peasants of Capilco and Cuexcomate were quite well-off economically. They were able to obtain trade goods from all over central Mexico, including obsidian from Pachuca and Otumba, salt from the Valley of Mexico, bronze goods from western Mexico, and ceramic serving bowls from the Valley of Mexico, Cholula, Toluca, Cuernavaca, and Yautepec (figure 5.8). These imported bowls, many with elaborate polychrome decoration, were found in nearly all houses. The large number of imported goods suggests that the inhabitants of Capilco and Cuexcomate were able to produce sufficient crops, textiles, paper, and other goods beyond their domestic needs and tax quotas to enter the markets as participants.
The presence of a noble's palace at Cuexcomate does not appear to have had much effect on the economic conditions of peasants since the artifacts from commoner houses at Cuexcomate were almost identical to those from houses at Capilco, where there were no nobles. If peasants had been severely exploited to the point where they spent all their time meeting household and tax demands, we would not have recovered such a rich and varied domestic artifact inventory at every house. Nevertheless, there were signs of social and economic stress just before the Spanish Conquest. In the Late Aztec B period (AD 1430–1550) the standard of living of both commoners and nobles at these sites declined. Demographic, economic, and political expansion had apparently reached the point of diminishing returns. Increasing taxes (both local and imperial) and declining agricultural yields probably combined to lower the standards of living of most families.23
The Aztecs Page 16