Michael Smith

Not too many people in the late 20th Century are capable of transporting themselves back in time more than 400 years — but Michael Smith is one of the lucky few. The University professor of anthropology has visited Mexico a number of times during the past 15 years to participate in archaeological excavations exploring the lives of the Aztecs — a people who resided in and near the Valley of Mexico from the mid 1300s until the arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes in 1519.

In the September issue of Scientific American, Smith detailed the expeditions he and his wife, archaeologist and editor Cynthia Heath-Smith, have made within the past several years to sites in what is now Morelos, a state in south-central Mexico. The excavations focused on three locales just south of “the heartland of the Aztec Empire,” the Valley of Mexico: the rural areas of Capilco and Cuexcomate, and Yautapec, a city-state capital.

Because no large-scale excavations had been undertaken until the late 1970s, when the government of Mexico took a hand in exploring the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, “we weren’t sure what kinds of things we were going to find,” Smith recalled. What he and the other archaeologists unearthed, however, was evidence of a civilization much more sophisticated and complex than many of us might imagine.

Smith wrote in Scientific American: “Aztec peasants were not simple farmers whose lives were dominated by the need to pay tribute to their elite overlords. Commoners living in both rural and urban areas of the provinces made heavy use of a thriving marketing system. They exchanged craft goods produced in their homes for a variety of foreign goods, and most of this economic activity was accomplished outside imperial control and ignored by early writers.”

The small (generally averaging 15 square meters) dwellings excavated in Capilco and Cuexcomate rendered a wealth of information about their former inhabitants. Ceramic ritual figurines, food preparation utensils, serving vessels; tools for the spinning of cotton; such “foreign” products as bronze needles and obsidian blades from other parts of Mexico, were commonplace in village homes. Basalt “bark beaters” that transformed wild fig tree bark into paper were also found; Smith noted in his article that “the Aztecs used paper to make books of picture-writing and to burn in ritual offerings.”

Similar artifacts unearthed at larger houses in Yautepec are still being classified and analyzed. Half a year of excavation at the onetime capital yielded “1.2 million potsherds [fragments of pottery] and nearly 50,000 obsidian artifacts, mainly blades and other tools,” according to Smith.

Self-sufficiency was evidently an Aztec trait, he noted. Rural villagers, who understood and appreciated what soil erosion and too much — or too little — precipitation could mean in terms of food production, maximized land usage by planting maize, bean, and cotton crops on checkdam terraces formed from hillsides and ravines. They may also have farmed the fields between houses.

One Aztec crop, cotton, was useful for clothing but absolutely vital as a commodity. Smith’s article pointed out that cotton textiles “were the most common item of tribute demanded by both city-states and the Aztec Empire, [and] served as a form of money in the marketplaces.” Aztec women, the anthropologist added, “from the lowest slave to the highest noblewoman, spun and wove cloth.”

Even so, the Aztecs were unable to ward off an economic downturn as the empire’s population grew and “farming reached a point of diminishing returns.” Smith and his colleagues were able to document “a significant decline between [late Aztec] periods A [1350 - 1400] and B [1440 - 1519] . . . Nobles as well as commoners had fewer imported goods and fewer decorated ceramic vessels in the later period. Wealth indices, which we calculated from the quantities of valuable artifacts found at each house, showed a consistent decline. Some commoners tried to compensate for their economic difficulties by increasing their production of textiles. At each site, the houses with the most cotton spinning artifacts were the ones with the lowest wealth indices.”

Smith’s findings are also contained in his book The Aztecs (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). What is his next project? “I’m still working on the Yautepec material,” he said. “For every month of field work, there are probably four or five months of lab work that have to be done.” And Smith will also continue to travel to Mexico to explore the lives of the Aztecs — and introduce Albany students to these fascinating people.