Aztec Agriculture

Some of the most impressive technological achievements of ancient Mesoamerican societies involved increases in the scale, efficiency, and overall productivity of agricultural land use systems. In late pre-Hispanic times, Mesoamerican farmers devised creative ways to meet the subsistence demands of burgeoning populations. Their solutions, which included terracing, irrigation, and raised fields, produced more food per unit of land than traditional farming methods. Anthropologists describe this process as “agricultural intensification,” which appears in many cases to coevolve alongside population growth and political centralization in the development of complex societies.

Agricultural intensification was a key economic process in the growth and development of the Aztec empire, which occupied highland central Mexico from the early 14th through the early 16th centuries AD. How the Aztec empire fed the large population of its capital, Tenochtitlan, has long intrigued researchers, since most of the city's estimated 250,000 inhabitants at the time of Spanish contact in 1519 were not food producers. Feeding the residents of Tenochtitlan and other urban places in the region was primarily the job of rural farmers. Agricultural intensification and exploitation of locally available resources provided these farmers with a mixed economy that ensured local prosperity, while supplying urban areas with critically important staple goods and raw materials.

Capitalizing on the mosaic of microenvironments afforded by the Basin of Mexico, Aztec farmers combined three distinct farming techniques:terraced hill-slopes irrigated by spring water that was carried long distances through complex networks of aqueducts, dry-farming fields watered by rain or alluvial flooding, and raised fields constructed as long rectangular plots in swamps and shallow lakebeds. These techniques were sometimes combined and supplemented with other methods, such as intercropping and fertilizing. This work, which took place year-round, produced very high yields of corn, beans, squash, fruits, chilies, chia, amaranth, and some species of cactus, all of which circulated widely in periodic community markets and in the Great Marketplace at Tlatelolco near the capital. In addition to providing daily sustenance, these staples were used in other ways in Aztec society, such as to mark social identity and hierarchy during political feasts, to pay tribute in support of the Aztec political economy, and to conduct religious rituals.