| Smaller towns that were under Aztec political domination have been investigated by archaeologists, and may give us a better idea of what life was like in neighborhoods within the city. Living in small buildings with stone floors but wattle and daub walls, rural farmers used obsidian and metal tools that were imported from long distances. Among their local pottery vessels and figurines are others from more distant settlements, suggesting their connections extended beyond the local sphere. Like the quarters of Tenochtitlan, each town seens to have had a major temple and plaza that were the location for administrative action. The administrative work we know the most about, because the Spanish were interested in it, is tribute collection. One source suggests the annual cloth tribute amounted to over 140,000 lots of textiles. Each town had an assigned level of tribute payments of various kinds, including cotton textiles. According to the Spanish descriptions of the system, local officials assigned tribute production to individual households, on the basis of the census data they were also responsible for maintaining. The burden was supposed to be shared in proportion to the number of workers in each household.
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