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Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico
... These measures include the standard deviation of elevation (a measure of terrain ruggedness) and an indicator representing whether the average elevation of a grid cell is lower than 1500 meters. This second metric is meant to proxy for the disease environment as malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases inhibited colonization of low-lying areas (e.g., Hassig 1985). Both measures were extracted using a 30-meter digital elevation model. ...
... Geographic features played an important role in pre-colonial population concentration. At the time of Spanish contact in 1519, the Triple Alliance (Aztec Empire) was a large and urbanized society with as many as 20 million residents ( Gibson 1964, Cook & Borah 1971, Hassig 1985. The nexus of population and power was the altiplano in the center of the country, which had several geographic advantages. ...
... Most notably, it was followed by one of the most dramatic demographic collapses in history. By 1650, a combination of disease, drought, and famine reduced the indigenous population by over 90% by most estimates (e.g., Cook & Borah 1971, Hassig 1985. The magnitude of the collapse has few parallels in history, the closest historical comparison arguably being the depopulation of Europe during the Black Plague. ...
Geography and history shape urbanization, but the importance of these factors may change over time. We trace Mexico’s urban development over 450 years using detailed subnational data on population, locational fundamentals, and trade access. The analysis shows that urbanization patterns remained largely unchanged from the colonial period until the mid-20th century despite major economic shocks, such as the collapse of Mexico’s indigenous population, the War of Independence, and the Mexican Revolution. However, the pull of historical population and the nature of geographic advantage were disrupted during the second half of the 20th century as international trade access began to play an important role in the emergence of new cities. The results indicate that while geography and history continue to influence urban development, economic policy can reshape these forces in important ways.
... This epidemic is believed to have been caused by a rodent-transmitted pathogen that emerged after several years of drought (Acuña- Soto, Romero, & Maguire, 2000). This population collapse caused the complete disappearance of initial institution of "enconmienda" instead of which Spanish crown adopted a series of legal institutions aimed at controlling land and labor in the context of severe population scarcity (Gibson, 1964;Hassig, 1985;Knight, 2002). The generated labor scarcity led to development of perverse political and economic institutions (Borah, 1976;Gibson, 1964;Knight, 2002), which resulted in specific landholding patterns (Sellars & Alix-Garcia, 2018). ...
... Upon the colonization of Mexico, the Spanish encountered large, urbanized and relatively advanced societies. The size of the indigenous population is estimated at around 20 million people (Gibson, 1964;Hassig, 1985;Maddison, 2007). After the conquest of Mexico, by mid-16th century, the Spanish instituted encomienda to extract tribute from the indigenous population. ...
This paper examines the contribution of administrative and procedural transaction costs to economic growth under common legal system. We show that administrative and procedural costs vary quite a lot even within the institutional environment sharing the common legal system. States with low‐cost business registration, low‐cost access to property rights and greater judicial efficiency tend to have consistently higher growth. The established effects are robust to alternative model specifications, heterogeneity bias, and to a variety of control variables that might confound the effects of administrative and procedural costs on growth. Such differences in costs are far from being trivial as we show that these within‐system differences might be instrumental in influencing economic growth. Lower administrative and procedural costs induce growth by increasing investment rate, lowering unemployment rate, encouraging labor supply and improving total factor productivity. In the counterfactual scenario, the transition from high‐cost to low‐cost regime is associated with substantial growth and development gains over time. By exploiting the variation in the disease environment, ethnic fractionalization and historical urbanization, we show that the negative effect of rising procedural and administrative costs on growth and development appears to be causal.
... Preference, however, is often manifest as a controlling social force in which political power dynamics are expressed through daily practice (de Certeau 1984). The cultural practices of elites who manage the state is discernible through institutionalized material extraction and production practice (Helms 1998) and can be performed in a myriad settings with varying accoutrement (Hassig 1985;Stein 1998;Wesson 2008). Historical and archaeological research provides the means of documenting the material manifestation of state hegemony (Brumfiel 1994;Feinman and Marcus 1998;Hassig 1985;Scott 1998). ...
... The cultural practices of elites who manage the state is discernible through institutionalized material extraction and production practice (Helms 1998) and can be performed in a myriad settings with varying accoutrement (Hassig 1985;Stein 1998;Wesson 2008). Historical and archaeological research provides the means of documenting the material manifestation of state hegemony (Brumfiel 1994;Feinman and Marcus 1998;Hassig 1985;Scott 1998). One area of research that can be used to address the performative power of the state is food practice (Mintz 1996;Weismantel 1998). ...
Questions of cultural difference in the prehispanic Andes have generally been addressed through studies of style (textile designs, ceramic form and decoration, burial patterns), space (settlement pattern), or material selection/sourcing (metal ores, lithic) analysis. Cultural preference, however, may be expressed by other means and cultural affiliation can be performed in a myriad of settings with varying accoutrement. One area of research that can be used to address cultural preferences and the performative power of the state is food practice. In this paper we analyze macrobotanical remains from two prominent Huari sites, Cerro Baúl and Conchopata. We demonstrate that these remains provide evidence for a cultural cooking practice and/or cuisine preference centered on chicha de molle production in elite Huari contexts during the Middle Horizon. Las cuestiones sobre diferencias culturales en los Andes prehispanicos han sido, por lo general, abordadas a través de los estudios estilísticos (patrones textiles, forma y decoración cerámica, formas de entierro), espaciales (patrones de asenta-miento), o de selección de materiales/proveniencia (minerales, líticos). Las preferencias culturales, sin embargo, se pueden expresar por otros medios y la filiación cultural puede realizarse en entornos múltiples con variados artefactos. Un área de investigación que puede utilizarse para discutir las preferencias culturales y la fuerza performativa del Estado es la prác-tica culinaria. En este artículo se discute evidencía de prácticas que no fueron registradas en restos iconograficos. A traves del analisis de los restos macrobotánicos de dos importantes sitios Huari: Conchopata y Cerro Baúl, se sostiene la presencia de una práctica culinaria, o preferencia gastronomica, centrada en la producción de chicha de molle en contextos de elite Huari durante el Horizonte Medio.
... Cada carga tenía unos 23 kgs, así que cada troje supone unas 12.000 cargas (23 × 12.000 = 276.000). Para transportar el grano necesitarían, entonces, doce mil hombres diarios, con sus utensilios de carga, su manutención, etc, lo que nos liga con el estudio de los tlameme y los problemas, muchos de ellos sin solucionar, que planteó Hassig (1985). Y es que la mayoría de esos «centros regionales» donde se concentraba el tributo está a varios días, y en algunos casos a semanas de viaje, de Tenochtitlan. ...
... En consecuencia, para poder usarles en mantener al personal no agricultor deben frecuentemente convertirse en bienes de subsistencia o utilitarios. Tal como se ha mostrado para el caso azteca (Brumfiel, 1980;Hassig, 1985; Smith, capítulo 3 de Monson y Schaedel, 2015), la conversión a gran escala puede requerir de un sistema de mercado en el cual los bienes del tributo usados como pago estatal, pueden intercambiarse por bienes de subsistencia o utilitarios. ...
... The importance of trade has long been recognized for Xoconochco, and it was once identified as a "port of trade," a particular kind of neutral trading center where trade was conducted among merchants from competing polities (Chapman 1957;Hassig 1985; but see Voorhies 1989b). As more data have become available, this concept has been largely abandoned in favor of approaches that consider the variable characteristics of trade centers (Gasco and Berdan 2003). ...
... In discussing the role of central authorities in raised field production, we also address the issue of whether state strategies were fundamentally managerial or political, or as we put it, incorporative or transformative. As we employ these terms, they define a continuum of strategies of productive organization and resource appropriation rather than a typology of broad political strategies (see DÕAltroy, 1992 andHassig, 1985 for analogous concepts). Incorporative strategies refer to relatively noninvasive or indirect strategies of productive intensification that leave direct management and distribution of resources in the hands of local communities. ...
Differing interpretations regarding the organization of past intensive farming are often distinguished as “top-down” or “bottom-up” perspectives. The development of intensive farming and its social organization are attributed to either nascent states and centralized governments or the incremental work of local communities or kin-based groups. We address the social organization of raised field farming in one region of the Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andean altiplano, Bolivia. We evaluate past research in the Katari Valley, including our own, based on recent settlement survey, excavation, and a variety of analyses. Taking a long-term perspective covering 2500 years, we find that relations of production and rural organization changed greatly over time in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions. Local communities played dynamic roles in the development and organization of raised field farming, yet its intensification and ultimate recession were keyed to the consolidation and decline of the Tiwanaku state. We conclude that the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy is overdrawn. Local communities and their productive practices never operated in a political or economic vacuum but both shaped and were transfigured by regional processes of state formation, consolidation, and fragmentation.
... In these markets one could find exotic commodities as well as other more mundane goods. Regional markets had a more dominant position within the hierarchy than the ordinary markets found in the cabeceras (head towns), and some of them were so prominent that they became famous for selling one product in particular (Hassig 1985). ...
Common salt, or sodium chloride, has always been a strategic resource of primary importance. In Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica salt was used mainly for human consumption, as the native diet (consisting mainly of plants such as maize, beans, chili peppers, squash, and so on) had little chloride and sodium (Williams 2003). Chloride is essential for digestion and respiration, and without sodium our organism would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, or transmit nerve impulses. Throughout the world, once human beings began cultivating crops, they began looking for salt to add to their diet (Kurlansky 2002:6–9).
In the preindustrial world sodium chloride had several important uses apart from its role in the diet, particularly as a preservative of animal flesh, as a mordant for fixing textile dyes, as a medium of exchange, and as a principal component in the preparation of soaps and cleansing agents (Parsons 1994:280).
The flow of strategic and scarce goods (including salt) from the subject provinces to the imperial capitals in Mesoamerica (such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital) was assured by the rulers through a geopolitical strategy that kept conquered communities under the obligation to pay tribute, and kept the lines of communication with the state core areas open at all times. The procurement and distribution of salt and other strategic resources (e.g., obsidian, copper, turquoise, jade, and so on) as well as the military control of the source areas and the extraction of tribute and trade were critical aspects for the economic and social life of most Mesoamerican polities. Imperial expansion toward resource-rich regions is ultimately explained by the desire to obtain precious commodities and vital resources, among which salt was always of paramount importance.
This chapter sketches two distinct modes of engagement pursued jointly by Franciscans and Nahua scholars as they produced a printed and manuscript corpus that spans the decades between the 1550s and the 1620s, which was impacted by censure and increasingly orthodox evangelization policies. It plumbs into the Nahua-Franciscan confidential mode to reveal a previously unknown work: a Nahuatl-language adaptation, by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina and one or more Nahua co-authors, of ‘On the Government of a Polity,’ a political treatise by the fifteenth-century theologian Denys the Carthusian. The chapter argues this translation was part of several attempts to test the boundaries of what Counter-Reformation policies allowed not only to be printed, but also to be circulated in manuscript form among indigenous colonial subjects.
This study explores the way in which traveling paths in ancient cultures are characterized by the relationship between nonlinear shapes and path lengths in terms of distances. In particular, we analyze the case of trade routes that connected Aztec settlements around 1521 CE in central Mexico. Based on the complex systems perspective, we used the least cost path approximation to reconstruct a hypothetical large-scale map of routes reproducing physical connections among ancient places. We compared these connections with different spatial configurations and identified the probability distribution functions of path lengths. We evaluated the nonlinearity using the mean absolute error based on the path fitness of simple linear models. We found asymmetrical distributions and positive relationships between those measures. If a path length increases, so does its nonlinearity. Thus, the simple pattern of traveling in the Aztec region is fairly unlikely to be straight and short. Complex pathways can represent most of the ancient routes in central Mexico.
This paper applies the interdisciplinary approaches of commodity chain, commodity circuit, and commodity network analyses—common in sociology, anthropology, and geography—to cotton cloth in the Aztec economy to demonstrate how these techniques can enrich archaeological understandings of ancient economies. Commodity chain analysis draws attention to social and economic dependencies that link people and processes along a production sequence and across wide geographic areas. Commodity circuits and commodity networks highlight the bundling of goods and knowledge in nonlinear and multidirectional flows, the relationships that link participants through these flows, and the flexible meanings and values of goods for participants. By applying these approaches to the archaeological study of cotton cloth in the Aztec economy, we show how they provide a holistic framework for studying goods that bridges the microscale (household) and macroscale (world system).
In this paper, we suggest a new analytical approach on a less-known and poorly investigated topic about early Church history in New Spain: the will to develop an institutionalized regular diocesan machinery in order to rearrange a Franciscan missionary Indian project with Tridentine Catholic ecumenical outcomes. To achieve that, we both report and analyze a wide spectrum of European and New Spain archival, documentary, and bibliographical sources related to the main Indian settlements, urbanism, and populations; Seraphic authorities, and civil vice-regal and royal officers. Preliminarily, we hypothesize that Indian ciudades were assumed to be the principal laboratories of this Seraphic-led project to strengthen friars’ traditional preeminence in a highly disputed colonial Christian theatre.
Questions about how archaeological populations obtained basic food supplies are often difficult to answer. The application of specialist techniques from non-archaeological fields typically expands our knowledge base, but can be detrimental to cultural interpretations if employed incorrectly, resulting in problematic datasets and erroneous conclusions not easily caught by the recipient archaeological community. One area where this problem has failed to find resolution is Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the center of one of the New World’s most vibrant ancient civilizations. Discussions of agricultural feasibility and its impact on local population levels at Chaco Canyon have been heavily influenced by studies of soil salinity. A number of researchers have argued that salinized soils severely limited local agricultural production, instead suggesting food was imported from distant sources, specifically the Chuska Mountains. A careful reassessment of existing salinity data as measured by electrical conductivity reveals critical errors in data conversion and presentation that have misrepresented the character of the area’s soil and its potential impact on crops. We combine all available electrical conductivity data, including our own, and apply multiple established conversion methods in order to estimate soil salinity values and evaluate their relationship to agricultural productivity potential. Our results show that Chacoan soils display the same salinity ranges and spatial variability as soils in other documented, productive fields in semi-arid areas. Additionally, the proposed large-scale importation of food from the Chuska Mountains region has serious social implications that have not been thoroughly explored. We consider these factors and conclude that the high cost and extreme inflexibility of such a system, in combination with material evidence for local agriculture within Chaco Canyon, make this scenario highly unlikely. Both the soil salinity and archaeological data suggest that there is no justification for precluding the practice of local agriculture within Chaco Canyon.
Navigation implies a deep knowledge of the environment in which it is practised as well as the development of correlated technologies and techniques. In fact, sailing in lakes, rivers, along coasts or in high seas requires specific skills. This is why watercraft reflect the specific expertise of cultures in relation to the available resources and materials. Navigation as a means of movement and boats as modes of transportation is a well-documented topic in Europe, Asia and the Pacific Ocean, whether focusing on antiquity or the present. Nonetheless, in the New World, especially in Mesoamerica where the Aztec, Tarascan and Mayan Empires flourished, indigenous maritime history has been thoroughly under-investigated. This article explores the first prehispanic dugout canoes of the region, based on a multidisciplinary approach for the Mexico and Pátzcuaro Basins, in the Late Postclassic period (AD 1325-1521). For the first time, a typology of these dugout types is proposed, with a discussion of the importance of dugout canoes as a means of transportation in Mesoamerican civilizations, where wheels and draught animals did not exist.
México-Tenochtitlan depended on a series of economic and administrative institutions to supply a resident population -that surpassed 200,000 inhabitants- with continuous and abundant flows of goods and services. This essay presents substantial archaeological and ethno-historical data in an effort to reconstruct the storage system at a supra-domestic, or state-level, scale and the multi-centric markets that were at the heart of this Mesoamerican city.
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