Mexican Maize Fields 37 



became money. There seems little doubt that the Indians liv- 

 ing north of the Rio Grande, the pueblo-dwellers of Zufii, 

 Acoma, Taos, the cliff-dwellers of Pecos, and others, traded in 

 Tenochtitlan and carried back to their desert lands grains of 

 maize and ideas of irrigation. 



Gradually, as the tribal wealth of the Aztecs increased, they 

 had evolved a system of slavery. Those who committed mis- 

 demeanors were deprived of membership in the tribe, and 

 were reduced to the lowest caste. A man who neglected 

 his garden for two years fell under this ban. He wore a wooden 

 collar about the neck; labored for a master and received for 

 his work not a share of the crop, as did the other "com- 

 munists," but what his owner thought was sufficient to keep 

 him in good working condition. 



As among all the Indian tribes, the lands were held and 

 worked communally. The basis of the commune was the 

 family. Even in the cities every family lived to itself in a sepa- 

 rate pueblo which housed two or three hundred persons of 

 close relationship. Over the doors of these "Palaices, curiously 

 buylded with many pleasant diuises," as Richard Eden de- 

 scribes them, was carved the animal totem of the family, and 

 on the jambs, the writhing serpents of Quetzalcoatl, late 

 Kukulkan, who had now become the legendary father-founder 

 of the Aztec nation. From these pueblos the men of the family 

 went forth to work the lands for which that family was respon- 

 sible to the tribe. 



As Cortes and his men rode higher into the hills, they came 

 to cities like Tlascala, well named "Place of Bread," a town 

 of thirty thousand set down in spreading cornlands; and where 

 the natives battled with them. And to Cholula where stood the 

 pyramid the temple of Quetzalcoatl, larger than the Great 

 Pyramid by the Nile and covering forty-four acres. Then 

 again they took up the march, climbing the mountain wall 

 that rims the Valley of Anahuac, led by their Tlascan guide 

 through the pass between the two smoking volcanoes. At 

 the top of the divide they drew rein to feast their eyes on 



