This chapter first looks at the primary sources available for the study of sexuality in Tenochtitlan in the sixteenth century, including paintings, sculptures, buildings, prayer books, legal codes, letters, chronicles, and judicial documents. Among the sources, the work directed by the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún is the most prominent. The chapter then addresses Nahua principles of sexuality, which were linked to fertility, pleasure, and moderation in sexual activities. When the principle of moderation was not followed, the consequences could be fatal for the community. The differences between social classes in regard to how people should conduct their sexual lives are looked at next; then, the different sexual practices, paying particular attention to attitudes towards these in moral discourses and texts written shortly after the Spanish conquest. In particular, abundant information is given about adultery, prostitution, gender identity, and same-sex relations. Finally, discourses aimed at women exalted virginity before marriage and fidelity to one’s spouse afterwards. By contrast, discourses addressed to men acclaimed the early self-discipline that would be rewarded with a successful marriage and beautiful children.

Sexuality in Indigenous societies of the Americas, prior to colonization by European powers, was characterized by an interplay between heterosexual reproductive sexuality (especially valued in hierarchical states) and forms of desire that extended beyond heterosexuality. Visual representations of sexual bodies from pre-colonial societies demonstrate that sexuality was emergent with age, with sexual difference most marked in young adulthood. Some representations suggest sexual relations between people occupying the same sexual status, or with people who may have been recognized as non-binary, third genders comparable to contemporary two-spirits. Diversity in sexual practices was rooted in ontologies that in well-studied cases converge on understandings of sexuality as non-binary, fluid, and emergent in practice. Previous understanding of visual sources that illustrate sex acts initially characterized as non-reproductive, such as anal penetration and oral sex, have changed as a result. Now scholars suggest a division between reproductive and non-reproductive sex ignores ontologies in which intergenerational reproduction was promoted by the circulation of bodily substances through sexuality not limited to heterosexual penetration. Critique of early colonial texts which imposed gender normativity on these societies and condemned actions that scholars can now see were acceptable has resulted from such new analyses.

This introduction consists of a brief overview of the people, cultures, and history of Mesoamerica, to give readers context and background for understanding precolonial Mesoamerican thought. It provides accounts of the languages, myths, and intellectual culture of the ancient Olmecs, one of the foundational early cultures of Mesoamerica, as well as of still extant groups such as the Maya, Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs.

In the early 1790s, three momentous discoveries of Aztec monoliths took place in the Mexico City central plaza, now commonly known as the Zócalo. The stones reemerged into the light of day after centuries underground due to Viceroy Revillagigedo’s ambitious plans to renovate this plaza into a clean and organized space. He carried out this plan by removing market stalls, as well as trying to prevent flooding by installing and improving the stone paving in the zócalo and the surrounding streets. Workers on these projects uncovered dozens of artifacts, including the monoliths known today as the Stone of Tizoc, the Aztec Calendar Stone, and the Coatlicue statue. The emergence of the artifacts took place over the course of sixteenth months, from mid-August of 1790 to mid-December of 1791.

This brief introduction flags up the problems of song recovery from eras before the advent of music publishing and mechanical recording. It pits assumptions of European colonial superiority against the voices and musical practices of America’s Indigenous people, from the Inuits of Alaska to the Aztecs of Mexico.

This chapter describes the forms of enslavement that existed in the Americas prior to contact with the Old World. Scholars have long avoided the subject due to their concern that indigenous Americans are already too much associated with savagery. However, the time has come to gather together all that we know of the varied forms of coerced labor. The information only helps us to humanize and comprehend ancient Americans. In Mesoamerica and South America, agricultural states did demand contributions from communities of laboring people; but though these people were diempowered dependents, they were not slaves. The vast majority of those who really were enslaved were prisoners of war who were maintained as domestics, most of them women. We even have some sixteenth-century texts that reveal something of these women's lives. Meanwhile, among the semi-sedentary peoples of North America, slavery likewise existed, as an effect of perennial warfare, but not nearly to the same extent as in the agricultural states to the south.

This chapter critically examines early sixteenth-century Spanish slave-raiding and invasion-related violence in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, emphasising the varied ways whereby indigenous peoples sought to mitigate, incorporate or reject the newcomers’ presence in the region. It begins with Columbus’s 1492 voyage and subsequent Spanish slaving activities in the Caribbean, then turns to the Spanish–Aztec War that devastated central Mexico, before closing with a discussion of the ‘Thirty Years War’ that disrupted Maya kingdoms. By connecting disparate flashpoints of war, high mortality rates, the enslavement of indigenous peoples and internal displacement, the long and complex tradition of violence that underpinned Spanish efforts to subjugate Aztecs, Mayas and hundreds of thousands of other indigenous peoples will be explored. Patterns to violence and warfare, however, were not unilateral; the leaders of indigenous Caribbean and Mesoamerica polities utilised violence according to their own customs and agendas. These particular wars of invasion and conquest can therefore be understood as part of a larger, multifaceted process.

Human sacrifice and other forms of ritual violence were widespread in the pre-Columbian Americas. This chapter focuses on ritual violence and human sacrifice in the ranked and stratified societies in the south-western and south-eastern culture areas of North America, in Mesoamerica, and the central Andes. It argues that, at least in some cultures, human sacrifices represented regular donations of energy to the supernatural sphere, a kind of “food for the gods” to maintain the cosmos. This kind of energizing was extended to deified humans. Companions and retainers were sacrificed as attendants of deceased high-ranking personages. Thus, the afterlife mirrored the social hierarchy on earth. Humans were also offered for the dedication and sanctification of temples. Some sacrificial victims became impersonators or representations of deities and other supernatural powers in ritual re-enactments of particular myths. They were considered messengers or mediators in the communication with the spiritual sphere. Humans were sacrificed as special donations pleading or reciprocating for certain benefits, such as a good harvest. The sacrifice could be an act of expiation, penitence and relinquishment redressing faults or sins of the sacrificing individual or collective.