Aztec DBQ Essay

There are many aspects of life that one can focus on for a certain population or in a country. Two main aspects of everyday life for the Aztecs were agriculture and human sacrifice. Of course both are highly important and part of the Aztecs society, but with an astonishing 10,000,000 people in the Aztec population, could one really put more emphasize one or the other? This is defiantly a tough question for historians to answer… or is it? To decide on great agriculture or brutal sacrifices, it would have made this decision much easier to choose from if we saw a first person document written by someone that was going to be sacrificed. For three important reasons, greater emphasis should be placed on agriculture: the enormous chinampas were out of this world, the amazing construction of the chinampas, and that it leads to be part of everyday life for the Aztec people.

The chinampas should be the center of attention due to their tremendous size and scale of the farms. As seen in the magnificent Diego Rivera mural, Document C, one can see chinampas “as far as the can see”. Diego Rivera is simply showing what everyday life was like for the Aztecs. According to Peter Stearns and other historians, there were approximately twenty thousand acres of chinampas that were constructed to grow four corn crops per year, document B. This helps suffice the great population of the Aztec people. Document B gives us the impression that the chinampas were thought out and designed very carefully by the Aztecs Similar to the great pyramids of Egypt, this was not an easy task for people who were only using wooden tools, their bare hands, and whatever useful they might have thought of to make the job easier, as seen in document C. Document C shows us the view point of a worker and how the people farmed. One can infer from that image that the Aztecs were well governed people with powerful rulers, which led to the great triumph of conquering others as seen in Document A. The chinampas