Aztec Housing and Living Conditions

In central Mexico, Nahua peoples spoke Nahuatl; the Mexica of Tenochtitlan were one Nahua polity. Homes varied between places such as Tenochtitlan and Yautepec in Morelos, a Tlahuica city-state conquered around 1440. The Triple Alliance formed in 1428 among Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan. Archaeological remains at Yautepec show how houses were built and altered; colonial descriptions and the Florentine Codex record domestic rooms, tools and household work.

On this page5 sections

Walls, floors and roofs

At Yautepec, archaeologists date one house-building phase to about 1300–1440 and another to about 1440–1520. Excavations uncovered seven houses with nearby refuse deposits. Three ground-level houses had foundations of two rows of stone, about 60 centimetres wide. Partly dissolved adobe, or dried mud brick, lay beside the foundations in two of them. The stone bases could support adobe walls. Burnt daub in three low-platform houses offers another clue: their walls may have used wattle-and-daub, a framework of sticks coated with earth. One ground-level house had a lime-plaster floor; archaeologists interpreted the other two as having packed-earth floors, or compacted soil.

Some Yautepec houses stood on low platforms averaging about 40 centimetres high. In Structure 2, a plastered step led down from the platform to the exterior floor between two houses; the platform leveled a slope. In Unit 505, excavators found a poorly preserved plaster floor and a plaster-lined tub-shaped feature from the Atlan phase, dated about 1440–1520, above an earlier refuse deposit. The report does not identify the feature’s use.

The Florentine Codex, completed in 1577 by Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators, describes both flat roofs made with poles and beams and peaked roofs thatched with straw. These are two of the roof forms its account gives for homes in central Mexico.

Rooms and household groups

Many commoner houses excavated in Morelos were small, single-room buildings. At Yautepec, five smaller structures measured roughly 16 to 58 square metres. One, Structure 1, began with a large central room and a smaller room to its east. Later builders dismantled part of its north wall and added space on the west, showing how a residence could be altered as its occupants’ needs changed.

Structure 1 belonged to a patio group with two other buildings. A patio was an open space shared by the surrounding structures. Comparisons with early colonial house maps from Tenochtitlan suggest that small buildings within a walled compound could house separate nuclear or joint families, often related to one another. Elsewhere in the Basin, commoner homes could be larger and contain several rooms.

Cooking, storage and furnishings

In Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, a housebuilder is described installing a hearth, making a smoke opening and providing a storage place. The hearth held the household fire, the opening let smoke escape, and the storage place kept household goods close at hand. Another Book 10 passage describes the comal, a flat clay griddle used to cook tortillas; Book 6 connects fetching water and grinding maize on a metate, a stone grinding surface, with work beside the hearth. For more on household food and preparation, see Food preparation.

The Codex identifies a petlatl as a reed mat and an icpalli as a seat. In a Book 11 illustration, a man lies on a mat with a pillow. These objects provided a place to sit or rest, while pots, baskets and other containers held ingredients, prepared foods and household materials. Refuse deposits beside the Yautepec houses preserve broken ceramics and other objects discarded during domestic activity.

Water and household sanitation

In Tenochtitlan, water reached the island city from mainland springs through masonry aqueducts along causeways. In his 1520 account, Hernán Cortés described two conduits, one carrying fresh water while the other could be cleaned, and channels that carried it over bridges. Canoes collected water below these channels and sold it through the city; paid attendants filled them from above. Canoe sales supplied the city broadly, while the engineering study by J. E. Becerril and Blanca Jiménez identifies direct aqueduct connections for palaces and noble houses.

Waste also moved through city systems. The same study describes privies in public places and many private dwellings in Tenochtitlan. Canoes collected human waste for use as fertilizer on chinampas, raised agricultural plots in the basin’s lakes, or for sale to people who tanned hides. The authors distinguish this solid waste from wastewater carried by city drains toward Lake Texcoco.

Differences in resources

The gap between a modest house and an elite residence is visible in Yautepec’s Structure 6. Its estimated area was about 425 square metres, many times larger than most excavated commoner houses. In an earlier phase it had carefully fitted stone walls and layered lime-plaster floors, some painted red; later rebuilding used rougher stone and soil under plaster. The floor stood roughly 50 to 100 centimetres above ground. Archaeologists identify it as an elite residence from its scale and construction, while the ruler’s palace occupied a much larger area, about 6,175 square metres.

Cortés’s 1520 description of Iztapalapa, on the southern shore of the lake, gives another specific contrast: the governor’s houses had many rooms, gardens, freshwater pools and an extensive kitchen garden. For the wider setting, see Daily Life in the Aztec World.