In April 2022, the Pre-Columbian Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks hosted a major conference in connection with the discovery of the huey tzompantli, or great skull rack, in the complex of the Aztec Templo Mayor (‘Great Temple’) in the metropolis of Tenochtitlan (what is now Mexico City). The world was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, so relatively few people attended in person, but a great many did virtually. Now editors Barbara Mundy, Leonardo López Luján and Elizabeth Hill Boone have brought the results to the rest of the academic world. It is a priceless contribution for numerous reasons.

First, the volume presents with great clarity the kind of information about the Aztecs that has been harvested by archaeologists at the Templo Mayor complex. The first chapter, by López Luján himself, offers the gist of what has been learnt in almost four decades of work on the site, since a February day in 1978 when workers for the Light and Power Company of Mexico City stumbled on a stunning carving that turned out to be a centrepiece of the Templo Mayor. It is a story of dynamism at the centre of the Aztec world. The second chapter, by Lorena Vázquez Vallin and Raúl Barrera Rodríguez, offers the first scholarly assessment in English of what has been learnt from the work done since the 2015 discovery of the great skull rack. This segment will be devoured – no pun intended – by many around the world. (Such readers will be startled to learn, for instance, that women constituted a large minority of those sacrificed, not a miniscule number.) The third chapter, by Ximena Chávez Balderas, attempts to settle an old debate, arguing cogently that the ceremonies were both spiritual in nature and purposely designed to magnify Aztec state power, rather than one or the other. Other archaeologists explore shell remains (Adrián Velázquez Castro), or consider the construction of surviving feathered art objects (Laura Filloy Nadal and María Olvido Moreno Guzmán) or use digital tools to reveal what the buildings once looked like (Michelle De Anda Rogel, Saburo Sugiyama and Leonardo López Luján).

Perhaps equally importantly, the work marries these contributions by archaeologists to others by art historians who work with post-conquest alphabetic texts written in Nahuatl by the people called Nahuas, including the Aztecs. Readers come to see clearly that these sources reveal a great deal about Aztec culture – even as it would have existed pre-conquest – that cannot be gleaned even from the grandest of archaeological sites. We learn about Aztec visions of the nature of luxury (Allison Caplan), for instance, or what the nature of mapping was understood to be (Barbara Mundy). In this way, we become acquainted with a people who believed in the ‘precious’ and the ‘marvellous’ as much as they believed in the need to sacrifice enemies and preserve their skulls.

Lastly, despite taking such a deep dive into a particular culture – that of the Nahuas, and especially the Aztecs – the editors did not fear to move to the level of meta-discourse. In the final chapters, we learn about Mexico’s nineteenth-century engagement with the earliest emerging Aztec remains and the way it continues to affect us (Sara Ryu), and about the long history of Dumbarton Oaks’ involvement with the Templo Mayor, as a conference on the topic in 1983 launched international conversations (Elizabeth Hill Boone). The last chapter most remarkably places the history of Tenochtitlan in conversation with that of Constantinople (Robert Ousterhout), both cities having been founded ‘with the explicit intent of becoming national capitals’ (p. 283) long before such things happened commonly. As the editors comment, the chapter ‘points up by example the benefits for scholars of Tenochtitlan to consider some of the questions Byzantinists ask about Constantinople’ (p. 8). In short, this book not only serves as a state-of-the-art compendium of scholarship on Tenochtitlan, but in addition pushes each scholar beyond their comfort zone, nudging us all to think about our subject from other angles.

If I have any critique at all, it is that even given the effort above, and despite the inclusion of scholars who work with Nahuatl-language sources, this book, like the vast majority of others by archaeologists and art historians, continues to privilege Spanish-language sources as companions for visual ones over anything written in Indigenous languages. In the introduction, the editors announce that the Spanish-language Crónica X sources (primarily, a work by fray Diego Durán, and another attributed – probably falsely, I would argue – to Moctezuma’s grandson, Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc), as well as the Spanish-language Codex Mendoza, are of crucial importance in illuminating archaeological findings (p. 2); and indeed, it is to these historical sources that most of the authors later turn. Historians, it seems, have failed to convince those who study visual sources to work harder at including those written by Nahuas, for Nahuas, in their own language, such as the many Nahuatl-language annals. Perhaps that can be the task of the next generation. In the meantime, we may all enjoy this valuable project on Aztec dynamism at the centre of the world.