gems, gems, jade, jadeite, fei cui, Mesoamerica, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mayans, Olmecs, Aztecs, archaeology, history, archaeogemology, Pre-Columbian jade; Costa Rica; Maya; exchange; iconography, lapidary, tribute indians paid to Moctezuma

The document published here by Francis V. Scholes and Eleanor B. Adams is the first systematic commentary on the Aztec tribute rolls to emerge from the sixteenth century. It consists of the court testimony of six Tlatelolco principales in 1554 regarding the tribute paid to Moctezuma. The witnesses commented upon an actual tribute roll of the Matrícula de Tributos type, and their observations provide important new evidence for reconstructing the Aztec imperial system and the tribute exacted from subject provinces. The imperial provinces appear in the order found in both the Matrícula de Tributos and the Codex Mendoza. The tribute roll examined by the witnesses evidently contained many more town names than are preserved in either of the two rolls known today, a fact that supports the frequently expressed view that the Matrícula de Tributos and the Codex Mendoza are incomplete. The testimonies record the number of towns in each province, although, except in the case of Petlacalco, where some names are given, the towns themselves are not identified. The editors also offer new interpretations concerning the quantity and nature of the tribute, festival obligations, the frequency of payments, land tenure, succession, and the mid-sixteenth-century value of the tribute formerly paid. The document is an important one, but it is the reviewer’s duty to object to an edition so limited that individual copies are sold at 200 pesos. — Charles Gibson, University of Iowa.