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The City State in Central Mexico at the Time of the Spanish Conquest*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Warwick Bray
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Extract

When the Spaniards first reached Mexico, one of the things which most impressed them was the existence of cities as large and as architecturally magnificent as any they had known in Europe. The growth and development of urban life has been examined in detail elsewhere, and for present purposes it is sufficient to note that, in areas where the techniques of intensive agriculture encouraged large nucleated settlements, the basic pattern of town life was established during the first millennium B.C.

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Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , November 1972 , pp. 161 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

1 Bray, Warwick, ‘Land use, Settlement Pattern and Politics in Prehispanic Middle America: A Review’, in Ucko, P., Tringham, R. and Dimbleby, G. (eds.), Man, Settlement and Urbanism (London, Duckworth, 1972), pp. 909–26.Google Scholar

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11 Ibid., p. 8.

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14 ‘The Colonial Plan of Cholula’, p. 215.

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17 William, T. Sanders, The Cultural Ecology of the Teotihuacán Valley (The Pennsylvania State University, Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology, 1965), pp. 76–85. Compared with the Classic-period city, Aztec Teotihuacán was much reduced in size and status. Its exact size is hard to assess, for it is partly covered by the modern pueblo.Google Scholar

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26 ‘The Population of the Teotihuacán Valley…’

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59 Sanders, , ‘Settlement Patterns in Central Mexico’, p. 24.Google Scholar

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61 There is no general agreement among the scholars who have studied this problem. It is evident that marriage restrictions were not rigidly enforced, and that there may have been differences between the customs of one town and another. For recent discussions of calpulli endogamy (with references to the more important earlier studies) seeCarrasco, P., ‘El Barrio y Ia Regulación del Matrimonio en un Pueblo del Valle de México en ci Siglo XVI’, Revista Mexicana de Estudios Antropológicos, 17 (1961), 7–26,Google Scholar and Carrasco, , ‘Social Organization of Ancient Mexico’, pp. 363–75.Google Scholar See also John, M. Ingham, ‘Time and space in Ancient Mexico the symbolic dimensions of clanship’, Man, 6, 4(1971), 614–21 (though some of Ingham's conclusions on symbolicism and on supra-calpulli units are open to argument).Google Scholar

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75 Ibid., p. 45.

76 Ibid., fig. 3.

77 Compare Ibid., fig. 2.

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95 Sanders, , Cultural Ecology of the Teotihuacán Valley.Google Scholar

96 The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, fig. 2.

97 ‘Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Post-Conquest Aztec Sites’ and El Valle de Teotihuacan:cerámica y patrones de asentamiento, 1520–1969’, Boletín dcl Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 41 (September 1970), 15–23.