The marketplace was the center of economic life across much of Mesoamerica. It was a creative, enabling force that more than any royal edict, military conquest, or religious tenant shaped the structure and organization of prehispanic society. It impacted the way that households organized their provisioning strategies, how elites converted food surpluses from their estates into storable wealth, and how imperial tribute was converted into the goods needed to operate the state bureaucracy. Marketplaces were where formalized trade took place and where the majority of goods moving in society changed hands. It was also the center of social life in Nahua society and where people of different social classes interacted with one another. It was where friends met, gossip was exchanged, economic livelihoods were defined, and the news of the day was shared and spread. In short, the marketplace was both a unique social institution and a macrocosm of the societies where it was found.

The marketplace was a formal institution. As discussed in Chapter 2, formal institutions are corporate organizations designed to provide specific functions for the society as a whole. Its primary economic function was to mobilize resources enabling households to procure what they needed and to dispose of any surplus that they produced. Without the marketplace highland Mesoamerica would not have had the commercial economic structure that it had. Like all formal institutions the marketplace required resources to operate in an efficient manner. Moreover, the marketplace could not operate without the development of a special ideology and place-specific mode of behavior.

This chapter discusses the importance of the marketplace in highland Mesoamerican society. It begins with clarifying what the marketplace is and what it is not. It then examines prehispanic marketplaces as they are known from the eyewitness accounts of the Spaniards who first saw them. Although the marketplace was a prominent institution, most everything known about its prehispanic organization and operation comes from accounts written during the early colonial period. Until archaeologists identify and excavate one in its entirety, these accounts remain the primary guide about their structure (see Hirth 1998, 2009b; Shaw 2012).