| We actually have remarkably little direct evidence for understanding Aztec life, since colonial Mexico City was deliberately built over Tenochtitlan. Much of our picture of life in the Aztec capital comes from texts, either those of early Spanish conquerors or the translations of texts written in native languages, such as the Florentine Codex. Archaeological explorations of the main temple in Tenochtitlan beginning in the late 1970s have added material support to what these documentary sources tell us about temple-centered religion. Explorations of rural Aztec towns have given us more information about everyday life, but small towns like these must necessarily have been quite unlike the life of the major metropolis. There are three major dimensions to the stories that anthropologists construct from archaeological and textual sources about the Aztecs . An abstract level presents Aztec intellectual culture as a unifying body of philosophical thought. Miguel Leon-Portilla is probably the major figure writing such works. A second pass through the same material precipitates an account of Aztec history and public religion, the historical accounts a sequence of named rulers tied to linear time, the religious accounts a sequence of named feasts united in the calendar cycles. Still the least common are accounts of Aztec life as lived reality, a day-to-day set of events as trivial as sweeping the floor and as profound as celebrating the birth of an infant.
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