This volume has grown out of my long-term interests in precolumbian Mesoamerican and the cross-cultural study of ancient economy. As an Economic Anthropologist I have always felt that New World societies are poorly understood and rarely incorporated into a systematic comparative discussion of economic complexity of ancient societies. Interest in the industrial revolution together within the broad theoretical framework of World Systems Theory has led to the impression that the indigenous societies incorporated into European colonial systems were simple suppliers of raw materials for the more complex Euro-centric economies of the Old World. The result is that the economic complexity of indigenous New World societies is often overlooked or underplayed. Furthermore as a Mesoamerican archaeologist, I feel that many students and colleagues have an incomplete understanding of how the precolumbian economy was organized. Archaeologists in Mesoamerica, like those in other areas of the ancient world, are keenly interested in the origin and development of complex society. While investigators have placed a great deal of attention on reconstructing the scale and organization of political structure, the complexity of the economic infrastructure that supported it is either not addressed or under studied.

The development of an evolutionary approach for studying complex society requires a comprehensive understanding of the society's socioeconomic structures and how they changed over time. Understanding the structure of the Aztec economy is the goal of this study. In the process I hope to take a step closer to identifying the structure and the complexity of highland Nahua economies at the time of the Spanish conquest. Only then can the Mesoamerican economy be compared in terms of scale, level of trade, and forms of production to that found in other state level societies of the ancient world. The development of a comprehensive picture of economic activity both here and by future investigators will bring us one step closer to incorporating this important region into a broader cross-cultural and comparative study of ancient economy.

The structure of the Aztec economic world is examined using the ethnohistoric and early colonial written sources. A small amount of archaeology information is used but only as supplemental data.