Question for June 2020

We know surprisingly little about Aztec housing. None remains standing. Built, mostly, of light wood, clay and thatch, few houses were intended to last for many generations. Nor was anyone interested enough, at the time, to record the buildings and who occupied them. It was probably because the house itself seemed less interesting than the home. That reveals something important about where, indeed, Aztec home life took place.
There are three sources of evidence which compensate for our lack of information. A few Aztec houses have been excavated by archaeologists. Administrators of Mexico City, the Spaniards’ capital which replaced the Aztecs’, did make measured plans of traditional houses and their yards during the earlier part of the Colonial period. Thirdly, the housing of the Aztecs’ descendants living in remoter districts of Central Mexico today has been studied.

Pic 1: Types of houses documented by Sahagún’s informants from the Aztec city of Tlatelolco, in the 16th century Florentine Codex. Construction materials range from simple pole-and-thatch structures to multi-room palaces made of stone masonry

For, once grown up and married, a proportion of people tend to set up house beside their parents’ dwelling. It is more usually sons who stay, rather than daughters. Up to three generations may live there. The children, then, are brought up together not just as brothers and sisters but as cousins too, in the care of aunts, uncles and grandparents as well as parents. The terms for kin do not distinguish strongly between siblings and cousins.

Pic 3: Contemporary Nahua (descendants of the Aztecs) prepare for a local religious festival

The early administrative plans from Mexico City show that most of the Aztecs’ Colonial descendants too housed themselves in single rooms. The records show the sizes precisely, how the rooms were arranged around yards, and some details of the occupants. Other documents confirm that such houses were used in much the same way as traditional houses today: windows were rare in the early Colonial period too. Usually depending on how numerous the household was, the number of rooms varied, in most cases, from six or seven down to a couple or even just one. Some were kitchens, sheds or shrines but most would have been used mainly as bedrooms.
The solitary houses or rooms of that time were probably for couples who had moved out to start a new household, perhaps in pursuit of a job opportunity. All being well, rooms would be added as children grew up and married. Single houses were probably more common in the largest towns; and probably more common after the Spanish Conquest than before.

Pic 5: Part of a planning document from 1573 (Plano 552) showing a simple Aztec house, measuring 3 fathoms (ie 18 ft.) broad (top) with (insert) the outline of an Aztec house foundation; plan of an extended family home in Xochimilco from 1653 (below)

In Aztec towns and villages, there were a few larger complexes of housing. Most of the rooms in these buildings were of about the same size as those of ordinary houses but there were more of them. These buildings were probably for the households of local headmen and nobles. The biggest secular buildings were the royal palaces. In effect, palaces were very large households, although many of the staff would have lived at homes of their own.

Pic 7: The palace of Nezahualcóyotl, based on the Quinantzin Map Codex