Tenochtitlan

Three words to get right first

• Mexica, not Aztec. That is what they called themselves. “Aztec” was popularized by Humboldt and Prescott in the nineteenth century. This exhibit uses it in the title because that is the word people search for, and corrects it here. The full entry, tiered and sourced, is The Mexica.
• Not the Maya. The 2012 material, the Long Count, the “end of the calendar” — all Maya, centuries earlier and hundreds of miles away. Nothing in this exhibit counts anything by a Long Count. The archive itself had that conflation in one data row until September 30, 2026; the Five Suns panel says where.
• Attributions, not counts. Sacrifice was real. The numbers in the chronicles — Durán's 80,400 for the 1487 dedication among them — are what a colonial writer reported, and are widely regarded as impossible. This exhibit reports the practice and tiers the numbers.

The through-line

The Mexica are remembered through two filters: the conquerors' account, and a New Age calendar myth that is not even about them. Between the filters sits a documented history of a people who rewrote their own past on purpose, built a state on a fifty-two-year clock, and buried their monuments so well that Mexico City has been tripping over them since 1790.

The six panels run in that order: the stone everyone misreads, the men who burned the histories, the ally whose portrait was painted over him, the clock, the trench that found the temple, and the cosmology all of it sits inside. Every panel is an encyclopedia entry rendered in place, so the exhibit cannot say more than the entry can defend.

How the entries are tiered

Two rewrites are documented in this exhibit and both are marked at their real strength. The burning of the histories under Itzcoatl is in Sahagún's Nahuatl sources; that Tlacaelel ordered it is León-Portilla's inference, and ships as one. Nezahualcoyotl's dike is in the ground; his monotheism is in a book his great-great-grandson wrote in the 1620s. A living tradition with over a million Nahuatl speakers is not a closed file, and every entry invites correction from inside it.