Enrique R. Rodríguez-Alegría

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin

chanfle@austin.utexas.edu

The adoptopn of indigenous engineering and architecture among Spnaish colonizers

Abstract:

Archaeological excavations by the Programa de Arqueología Urbana (PAU) of the Templo Mayor Museum provide access to the remains of the houses of Spanish colonizers in sixteenth-century Mexico City. The archaeological remains of these houses are often sandwiched between late colonial or modern architecture as well as the more famous pre-Columbian architecture of the Mexica capital. The colonial houses excavated by the PAU provide an opportunity to describe the architecture and understand how people transformed Tenochtitlan into Mexico City. I will contribute an original compilation and analysis of descriptions and drawings of early colonial domestic architecture excavated and published by the archaeologists of the PAU in dozens of articles. Colonial architecture often receives little attention in articles that focus on Aztec remains, but when compiled the descriptions of early colonial houses show a city in which Spaniards lived amid the ruins of the Aztecs and often took advantage of those ruins as part of their own domestic architecture. Remarkably, the houses of Spaniards featured almost all of the engineering technologies and architectural traits of Aztec palaces. This is a striking testimony of the adoption of the products and organization of indigenous technology among colonizers, and it shows that indigenous people contributed labor, social organization, and intellectual work to the construction of the houses of Spanish colonizers.

Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has done archaeological and archival research on Mexico City and Xaltocan, Mexico. He is the author of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico: Mixing Epistemologies (Cambridge), and co-editor of Xaltocan: arqueología, historia y comunidad (with Christopher Morehart and Kristin De Lucia), The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (Oxford) (with Deborah L. Nichols), and The Menial Art of Cooking (U. Colorado) (with Sarah Graff). His upcoming book examines the material worlds of Spanish colonizers in sixteenth-century Mexico City based on probate inventories and archaeological material.