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Question for July 2015

If the Aztecs died of old age how long did they expect to live for?? Asked by Dulwich Prep School. Chosen and answered by Professor Michael E. Smith

The average life expectancy for an Aztec was only 25 years. This is based on studies of the age at death of skeletons found in burials from the Aztec period. But this figure is a bit misleading, because the Aztecs - like many peoples in the developing world today - had high rates of infant mortality. Even though Aztec medicine was in many ways more advanced than European medicine at the same time (early Spaniards in Mexico preferred Aztec doctors to Spanish doctors!), there were just too many diseases and other causes of death for infants. When many infants die, these deaths bring down the average figure for life expectancy. After the Spanish conquest the life expectancy of people in some rural Mexican villages dropped to as low as 15 years because of the many epidemic diseases that raged through Mexico.

But if an Aztec (before 1519) lived to be age 15, then the average life expectancy was 19 more years (age 34). So those who survived infancy were often healthy and sturdy individuals who would live a longer life. 34 years sounds like a short life today, but then people in western nations today have the longest life expectancy of any people who ever lived on earth.
One consequence of the low Aztec life expectancy is that people married at an early age. Men typically married at around 19 years of age, but the average age for their brides was 13 years! These married “women” started having babies within just a few years of their marriage. This custom upset an early Spanish Viceroy (official), Martin Enriquez, who complained about “the custom in the time of their paganism [that is, before the Spanish conquest] to marry almost at birth because no girl reached the age of twelve without marrying.”

This information is from works by demographer Robert McCaa. I discuss some of these facts in my textbook, The Aztecs.

McCaa, Robert
1994 ‘Child Marriage and Complex Families Among the Nahuas of Ancient Mexico’. Latin American Population History Bulletin 26: 2-11
2000 The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution. In A Population History of North America, edited by Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, pp. 241-304. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Smith, Michael E.
2012 The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Picture sources:-
• Pic 1: illustration drawn for Mexicolore by Felipe Dávalos; photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 2: illustration (top) drawn for Mexicolore by Felipe Dávalos; photo by Evita Sánchez Fernández/Mexicolore.

Professor Michael E. Smith has answered 5 questions altogether.

Where did the aqueduct go to (from Tenochtitlan)?

Were there rich and poor in Aztec times?

If the Aztecs died of old age how long did they expect to live for?

Why did Aztec houses have no windows?

Did being poor in Aztec times affect you in the afterlife? (2)

Comments (1)

Dave P

27th Dec 2023

Life expectancy isn’t misleading, but it should be qualified as expectation of life at birth where that’s the case. But I think you’ve misread McCaa’s table though in estimating Aztec expectation of life at age 15 to be just 19 years: McCaa’s column for age 15 actually gives the additional years, so it’s 34 further years on average rather than 19 - the individual can expect to live to age 49 if they’re among the lucky half who make it to 15.
Usually it’s the other way round, with people adding the present age and the expectation of additional years and claiming that’s the life expectancy, so thank you for not making that mistake, but it wasn’t quite so bad as you imagine, despite the appalling infant and child mortality. But I still think it’s life expectancy at birth that counts: infant mortality is a part of the whole, and can’t just be sifted out.
I wonder if early marriage often existed only “on paper” in the first years: it seems to have been common ancient and medieval Old World practice (notably in Asia) to marry girls at what seem to us very young ages, but to postpone cohabitation until both partners were more mature. Is there anything that might suggest such an arrangement in precolumbian Mesoamerica?

Mexicolore

Many thanks for these wise observances!
Marriage, at least for the Mexica, was a highly ritualised, controlled and obviously important event in a young couple’s lives. Young men tended to marry around the age of 20, women slightly younger. A young woman might opt to enter a religious order first until she and her family felt sufficiently mature and ‘ready’ for marriage. Pre-marital relations were strictly punished (though there were exceptions). Interestingly, following the marriage ceremony itself (which literally involved ‘tying the knot’ of their wedding clothes together) ‘the couple were taken to a chamber guarded by the matchmakers “to do penance and fast for four days before cohabiting”. Ostensibly devotional in purpose, this period also permitted the couple time to build a relationship before commencing conjugal contact.’ See the chapter ‘Tying the Knot’ in Caroline Dodds Pennock’s excellent book ‘Bonds of Blood’ (2008).