The
Aztecs/Mexicas were the native American people who dominated northern
México at the time of the Spanish conquest led by Hernan CORTES in the
early 16th century. According to their own legends, they originated
from a place called Aztlan, somewhere in north or northwest Mexico. At
that time the Aztecs (who referred to themselves as the Mexica or
Tenochca) were a small, nomadic, Nahuatl-speaking aggregation of tribal
peoples living on the margins of civilized Mesoamerica. Sometime in the
12th century they embarked on a period of wandering and in the 13th
century settled in the central basin of México. Continually dislodged
by the small city-states that fought one another in shifting alliances,
the Aztecs finally found refuge on small islands in Lake Texcoco where,
in 1325, they founded the town of TENOCHTITLAN (modern-day Mexico
City). The term Aztec, originally associated with the migrant Mexica,
is today a collective term, applied to all the peoples linked by trade,
custom, religion, and language to these founders.
Fearless
warriors and pragmatic builders, the Aztecs created an empire during
the 15th century that was surpassed in size in the Americas only by
that of the Incas in Peru. As early texts and modern archaeology
continue to reveal, beyond their conquests and many of their religious
practices, there were many positive achievements:
the formation of a
highly specialized and
stratified society and an imperial administration
the expansion of a
trading network as well as a tribute system
the development and
maintenance of a sophisticated
agricultural economy, carefully adjusted to the land
and
the cultivation of an
intellectual and religious outlook
that held society to be an integral part of the cosmos.
The
yearly round of rites and ceremonies in the cities of Tenochtitlan and
neighboring Tetzcoco, and their symbolic art and architecture, gave
expression to an ancient awareness of the interdependence of nature and
humanity.
The
Aztecs remain the most extensively documented of all Amerindian
civilizations at the time of European contact in the 16th century.
Spanish friars, soldiers, and historians and scholars of Indian or
mixed descent left invaluable records of all aspects of life. These
ethnohistoric sources, linked to modern archaeological inquiries and
studies of ethnologists, linguists, historians, and art historians,
portray the formation and flourishing of a complex imperial state.
