The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History

Winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize

Scholars have long viewed histories of the Aztecs either as flawed chronologies plagued by internal inconsistencies and intersource discrepancies or as legends that indiscriminately mingle reality with the supernatural. But this new work draws fresh conclusions from these documents, proposing that Aztec dynastic history was recast by its sixteenth-century recorders not merely to glorify ancestors but to make sense out of the trauma of conquest and colonialism.

The Aztec Kings is the first major study to take into account the Aztec cyclical conception of time—which required that history constantly be reinterpreted to achieve continuity between past and present—and to treat indigenous historical traditions as symbolic statements in narrative form. Susan Gillespie focuses on the dynastic history of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, whose stories reveal how the Aztecs used "history" to construct, elaborate, and reify ideas about the nature of rulership and the cyclical nature of the cosmos, and how they projected the Spanish conquest deep into the Aztec past in order to make history accommodate that event.

By demonstrating that most of Aztec history is nonliteral, she sheds new light on Aztec culture and on the function of history in society. By relating the cyclical structure of Aztec dynastic history to similar traditions of African and Polynesian peoples, she introduces a broader perspective on the function of history in society and on how and why history must change.

Susan D. Gillespie is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received a Ph.D. in 1983. The 1980 Komchen archaeological project in Yucatán introduced her to fieldwork in Mexico, and she has since directed excavations at Charco Redondo, on the coast of Oaxaca, and at Llano del Jícaro, an Olmec monument workshop in Veracruz. Her interest in archaeological theory led her to reexamine the popular story of Quetzalcoatl and the Toltecs in Mesoamerican prehistory in order to determine why archaeologists retained their faith in this ambiguous episode from postconquest historical traditions rather than trust their own archaeological data, which often contradicted it. This book resulted from that inquiry. Among her other publications on pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican ideology and iconography are "Ballgames and Boundaries," in The Mesoamerican Ballgame, edited by Vernon L. Scarborough and David R. Wilcox (University of Arizona Press, 1991).