ARCHAEOLOGICAL DEPOSITS FROM THE AZTEC NEW FIRE CEREMONY

The New Fire Ceremony is one of the few Aztec rituals documented in both the archaeological and historical records. The Spanish chroniclers described the New Fire Ceremony as an imperial celebration of the renewal of cosmic time that was observed on the local level by the renewal of household goods. George C. Vaillant first proposed the identification of artifact dumps at Aztec sites with descriptions of these local celebrations. We describe unpublished artifact dumps excavated by Vaillant at Chiconautla and Nonoalco in the Basin of Mexico and by Smith at Cuexcomate in Morelos and show that their context and content support Vaillant’s hypothesis. Our data suggest that the New Fire Ceremony was an ancient and widespread ritual in Postclassic central Mexico that was appropriated by the Aztec empire as part of its program of ideological legitimization and control. Our current knowledge of Aztec religion and ideology is strongly skewed toward the official state religion of Tenochtitlan. There are very few ethnohistoric descriptions of domestic or community religion, in contrast to the abundant sixteenth-century descriptions of Aztec state religion, with its complex mythology, its elaborate cosmology and iconography, and its flamboyant rituals involving human sacrifice, public processions, music, and dance. Modern scholarship has followed this trend in the available data by focus-ing almost exclusively on Aztec state religion (e.g., Brundage 1985; D. Carrasco 1991, 1999; Graulich 1999; Nicholson 1971b). There is little information on the extent to which the well-described state-sponsored myths, cosmology, and rituals were shared or im-itated by commoners or people outside Tenochtitlan. The lack of excavations at Aztec sites makes it difficult to establish points of contact between state and household religion. The extensive excavations at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, which provide important archaeological data on key Aztec impe