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How Archaeology Confirms the Veintena Feast Cycle

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How Archaeology Confirms the Veintena Feast Cycle

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Michael Smith's standard textbook on Aztec archaeology and ethnohistory synthesizes decades of excavation reports alongside the colonial documentary sources, Smith's own fieldwork at Aztec period sites among the evidence it draws together, into one coherent account of Aztec religion, society and daily life.

That independent archaeological record matters for a veintena entry because it lets a documented feast description from a colonial era text like the Florentine Codex be checked, where the physical record survives, against material evidence, temple offerings, seasonal agricultural remains, architectural alignments, rather than resting on a single kind of source alone.

A veintena entry therefore notes, where Smith's synthesis allows it, whether a given feast's documented description finds independent archaeological support, since a textbook's value is exactly this kind of cross checking synthesis of a whole field's evidence, strongest where the field broadly agrees and weaker wherever the underlying archaeology itself remains genuinely unsettled. Smith's synthesis also documents where the archaeological record and the colonial textual sources genuinely disagree, not only where they align, and an entry notes such a documented conflict honestly rather than silently preferring one kind of evidence over the other.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Veintenas, Categories
Sources
The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition)
Michael E. Smith, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012View the Source
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