How Many Families Did Mayan and Aztecs Houses Hold

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Nicholas James

Question for June 2020

How many people lived in a house (i)? Asked past Shinfield St Mary'southward CE Inferior Schoolhouse. Chosen and answered past Nicholas James.

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
Picture show 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 rock masonry (Click on image to enlarge)

We know surprisingly little virtually 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 plenty, at the fourth dimension, to record the buildings and who occupied them. It was probably considering the business firm itself seemed less interesting than the habitation. That reveals something important near where, indeed, Aztec abode 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 United mexican states City, the Spaniards' uppercase which replaced the Aztecs', did make measured plans of traditional houses and their yards during the before role of the Colonial flow. Thirdly, the housing of the Aztecs' descendants living in remoter districts of Primal United mexican states today has been studied.

Pic 2: Contemporary Aztec thatch-roofed house. Firewood for the cooking fire is stacked to the right and some of the family clothing is hanging against the house on the left
Flick 2: Contemporary Aztec thatch-roofed house. Firewood for the cooking fire is stacked to the right and some of the family clothing is hanging confronting the house on the left (Click on paradigm to enlarge)

Today's housing looks much similar what both the digs and the Colonial records show. Written report of how such buildings are occupied and used at present makes us more than confident well-nigh how many people occupied an Aztec business firm.
Information technology is not a unproblematic affair. Traditional villagers today think of themselves as members of households rather than occupants of particular houses. Rarely do households represent to houses, one to i. The household comprises everyone living in a cluster of houses. These people are unremarkably kin, perhaps with friends who have joined them.

Pic 3: Contemporary Nahua (descendants of the Aztecs) prepare for a local religious festival
Pic 3: Contemporary Nahua (descendants of the Aztecs) prepare for a local religious festival (Click on epitome to overstate)

For, once grown up and married, a proportion of people tend to set upwards house beside their parents' abode. Information technology is more usually sons who stay, rather than daughters. Up to three generations may live in that location. The children, so, are brought upwards together not just every bit brothers and sisters merely as cousins too, in the care of aunts, uncles and grandparents too as parents. The terms for kin do not distinguish strongly between siblings and cousins.

Pic 4: Model of a simple rural family's house and patio in Aztec times (top); boys playing marbles beside their houses in a Nahua village today (bottom)
Pic 4: Model of a uncomplicated rural family'due south firm and patio in Aztec times (top); boys playing marbles abreast their houses in a Nahua village today (bottom) (Click on epitome to enlarge)

Habitation life takes place in the grand or yards (patios) between the houses. The houses are little used past day. Mexico's climate is warm or balmy, later on all. Most traditional houses are single rooms without windows. Even in the rainy season, it is normally merely in the later hours of the twenty-four hour period that shelter is needed and and then people tend just to retreat to the eaves rather than sitting inside. By night, the houses are occupied by a pair of parents and their own children.
The aforementioned pattern, the articulation family unit (as it is termed) occupying pocket-sized houses around a yard, is known in other parts of the world too. To be certain, such families are rarer in Mexico at present; but the practice helps to brand sense of the Aztecs.

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)
Pic 5: Part of a planning document from 1573 (Plano 552) showing a simple Aztec firm, measuring three fathoms (ie xviii ft.) broad (peak) with (insert) the outline of an Aztec house foundation; program of an extended family unit home in Xochimilco from 1653 (below) (Click on image to enlarge)

The early administrative plans from Mexico City show that about of the Aztecs' Colonial descendants also 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 fifty-fifty just one. Some were kitchens, sheds or shrines but nearly would have been used mainly as bedrooms.
The solitary houses or rooms of that fourth dimension were probably for couples who had moved out to start a new household, peradventure in pursuit of a job opportunity. All existence well, rooms would be added as children grew up and married. Single houses were probably more common in the largest towns; and probably more mutual after the Spanish Conquest than earlier.

Pic 6: 'Adjoining houses', Florentine Codex Book 11
Flick six: 'Adjoining houses', Florentine Codex Volume 11 (Click on image to enlarge)

Archaeologists have investigated the ruins of a few Aztec villages where rock foundations and footings survived. The forms and sizes of the buildings exposed were like to both the houses recorded in the Colonial records and those in traditional villages today. At Cihuatecpan, almost houses were clustered but not gathered around yards. In stead, rooms seem to have been added straight onto each other; but the number of rooms to a unmarried building appears to take varied in the aforementioned fashion that the number of buildings effectually a chiliad varied in the capital letter or that the number of houses to a cluster varies in today's villages.

Pic 7: The palace of Nezahualcóyotl, based on the Quinantzin Map Codex
Moving picture 7: The palace of Nezahualcóyotl, based on the Quinantzin Map Codex (Click on paradigm to enlarge)

In Aztec towns and villages, there were a few larger complexes of housing. Virtually of the rooms in these buildings were of about the same size as those of ordinary houses but there were more than 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 8: Artist's impression of a small Mexica family home at Xochimilco; illustration by Felipe Dávalos
Flick viii: Creative person's impression of a small Mexica family habitation at Xochimilco; illustration past Felipe Dávalos (Click on paradigm to enlarge)

Nigh Aztec houses, then, were rooms that sheltered a pair of adults and two or three children at night. Depending on the number of adults, a household had more houses or fewer, probably varying from generation to generation. Dwelling house would accept included the whole group of rooms and, most chiefly, the yard between them.

Further reading:-
• S.T. Evans (ed.) 1988 Excavations at Cihuatecpan, an Aztec village in the Teotihuacan valley Vanderbilt Publications in Anthropology 36
• J. Lockhart 1992 The Nahuas afterward the Conquest: a social and cultural history of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries Stanford: Stanford Academy Press [run into Chapter 3]
• A.R. Sandstrom 1991 Corn is our blood: culture and ethnic identity in a contemporary Aztec Indian village Norman: University of Oklahoma Printing [see pp. 107-13, 159-72].

Movie sources:-
• Moving-picture show ane: epitome courtesy of David Carballo
• Pix two, 3 & 4 (bottom): photos courtesy of and © Alan R. Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom
• Pic 4 (meridian): photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Picture 5 (acme): paradigm (original in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City) scanned from 'Los Barrios de Tenochtitlan. Topografía, Organización Interna y Tipología de sus Predios' by Alejandro Alcántara Gallegos, chapter v in Historia de la Vida Cotidiana en México, vol. I ed. Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, El Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultural Económica, Mexico, 2004, p. 175
• Moving-picture show 5 (insert): analogy from The Essential Codex Mendoza past Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, 1997
• Film v (bottom): prototype from Archivo Full general de la Nación, colección Mapas, Planos eastward Ilustraciones, nº 2844, downloaded from
https://museoamparo.com/exposiciones/pieza/2806/plano-de-una-casa-en-xochimilco-ciudad-de-united mexican states
• Picture show 6: image from the Florentine Codex, Book xi, facsimile edition published by the Club Internacional del Libro (Madrid, 1994)
• Pic vii: image from the Códice Mapa Quinatzin, p. 146
• Motion-picture show eight: illustration courtesy of Felipe Dávalos, from Viaje al mercado de México by Leonardo López Luján, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico Urban center, 2000.

'Home smoky home!'

See another answer to this question from Professor Jennifer Mathews

Nicholas James has answered 2 questions altogether:

Did the Aztecs forcefulness you to exist who you were?

How many people lived in a house (1)?

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