The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition)

The Aztecs is Michael E. Smith's standard university textbook on Aztec archaeology and ethnohistory, now in a third edition and used across Mesoamerican studies courses for its synthesis of decades of excavation reports, colonial era documentary sources and modern scholarship into one coherent account. Smith is a working archaeologist whose own excavations at Aztec period sites in central Mexico underpin much of what the book reports, so its authority rests on that direct fieldwork record as well as on the wider literature it draws together, not on the publisher's name alone. Published by Wiley-Blackwell, an academic press, it goes through the ordinary editorial review a textbook of this kind receives, and the successive new editions reflect ongoing correction as the archaeological record has grown. It is strong evidence for settled points of Aztec social organization, religion, economy and daily life where the field broadly agrees, and weaker evidence wherever the underlying archaeology itself remains disputed or incomplete, since a textbook's job is to summarize a field rather than resolve its open questions.