Everyday Life in the Aztec World

by Frances F. Berdan, Michael E. Smith

In Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Frances Berdan and Michael E. Smith offer a view into the lives of real people, doing very human things, in the unique cultural world of Aztec central Mexico. The first section focuses on people from an array of social classes - the emperor, a priest, a feather worker, a merchant, a farmer, and a slave - who interacted in the economic, social and religious realms of the Aztec world. In the second section, the authors examine four important life events where the lives of these and others intersected: the birth and naming of a child, market day, a day at court, and a battle. Through the microscopic views of individual types of lives, and interweaving of those lives into the broader Aztec world, Berdan and Smith recreate everyday life in the final years of the Aztec Empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

Published October 8, 2020

About the author

Frances F. Berdan is an American archaeologist specializing in the Aztecs and professor emerita of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino. Berdan has authored many influential books about the Aztec civilization.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 2 out of 5]

First DNF of 2022. There is no meat on the bones of this exceedingly dry book. What I was looking for was an account such as Liza Picard's Restoration London: Everyday Life in the 1660s where I can imagine the houses, the furnishings, what they eat, how they dress, what they do for entertainment, education etc.

This book is just dry bits of history with references. I read about the kings, apart from being extravagant, having a lot of wives, relying on tributes for the slaves to sacrifice I learned only one thing: people could not be sacrificed without training in the part they had to play in the ceremony. There was very, very little about women at all. Women seem to be just there to provide sex, babies and do the chores, not much has changed except that in the West girls are not given to men as wives by their families (or sold). I wish I could say that for all the world.

So then I moved on to the first occupation, the feather man who makes all those glorious feather creations. All I learned was that demand outstripped supply. There was so little of his life, I just gave up. 2022 is going to be a good year, not a year of forcing myself to read things that bore and annoy me. So dnf. 2 star as 1 star is reserved for despicable books or authors.
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It will be interesting to read a book about the Aztecs that doesn't primarily focus on the seemingly constant and extremely bloody and torturous sacrifice of people to their gods. And chocolate. Aztecs are pyramids, maize, chocolate and Montezuma's revenge. It's called funny tummy or in its worse presentation norovirus, these days. As bad as covid, I've had both.

[Alicia Tapia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satiated my continuing fascination and curiosity but I still wanted to learn more about the ways in which they saw and understood their world as interconnected and kincentric. Given that this is a non-fiction, evidence-based book, I can see why authors wouldn’t want to make too much of an assumption about what these beliefs might be but even the vignettes felt lacking. Actual reading of their primary sources like in “The Language of Kings” by León-Portilla is a little more insightful, but not whole—- guess you can’t put pieces together confidently when the Spaniards came in and destroyed everything!