Angela Huster – Aztec Conquest of the Toluca Valley

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When the Spanish collected Native historical accounts of the preconquest Toluca Valley for a series of 16th-century court cases, the Triple Alliance-Aztec conquest of the region, a generation earlier, featured prominently in local narratives. The Toluca Valley, immediately west of the Aztec heartland in Central Mexico, was not one of the growing empire’s first conquests, but it was one of the first times that the state had to incorporate an ethnically and linguistically different population. This presentation gives an overview of the region’s archaeology and a look at the effects of Aztec rule on the commoner majority of the population, based on the results of two recent projects in the area.

Speaker Angela Huster is a senior archaeologist at Chronicle Heritage and a visiting researcher at Arizona State University. She has worked across multiple periods in Central Mexico, including at Classic-period Teotihuacan, and several Epiclassic and Postclassic sites. Her research interests focus on people’s strategies at the temporal and spatial margins of political changes, through household archaeology and ceramic analysis. Her most recent articles appear in the Journal of Arizona Archaeology (forthcoming), Ancient Mesoamerica, and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.