Aztec medicine.

THE discovery of America placed the European nations in contact with three major civilizations, the Aztec in the Mexican plateau, the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula, and the Inca in the Peruvian Andes. The Mayas had been settled for centuries in the same area and developed a civilization with high cultural manifestations, whereas the Aztecs and Incas, in spite of their political power and strong resistance to the Spanish conquest, were actually cultural parvenues among pre-Columbian people. The Aztecs were the most powerful among Mexican nations at the time of Cortes's arrival, and after a long migration from the north, they had settled in Chapultepecon the shores of the Lake of Texcoco-around A.D. 1267. Historical sources make it possible to trace the evolution of the Aztecs before the European arrival; nevertheless the field of Mexican archaeology is expanding considerably and many ideas are still sufficiently fluid to be subject to correction, as Krickeberg (1961) has pointed out. On the other hand, there is at present a much more critical attitude in the study of American archaeology and its medical aspects.