Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Mesoamerica

All cities known to social scientists and historians have neighborhoods. People living in urban settings universally organize important aspects of their lives on a spatial scale that is intermediate between the household and the city. Urban authorities also tend to organize administrative ac­ tivities such as tax collection and record keeping on a similar scale. The spatial relationship between these latter units, which Smith (2010) has called districts, and neighborhoods proper, varies among cities and time periods. Given the universality of neighborhoods and districts, it is not surprising that these were important spatial and social units in the cities of ancient Mesoamerica. Archaeological research into Mesoamerican neighborhoods and dis­ tricts has been slow to develop for a variety of reasons. First, urban resi­ dential zones are difficult to identify and analyze with archaeological data. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most thorough analysis of ancient neighborhoods—Elizabeth Stone’s (1987) Nippur Neighborhoods—and the most complete synthesis of neighborhood data in an ancient urban tradition (Keith 2003), both come from Mesopotamia and employ both archaeological and textual sources. Similarly, the most complete data on Mesoamerican neighborhoods are from the Aztec period, during which