Thoughts on Postclassic Mesoamerica and its development

[Every Grass in Java]

This was originally a post for my Pre-Columbian timeline here, but I thought it was worth posting here for general discussion. I'm breaking up the original post since it was such a hassle to edit (it's ten pages long in Word, not including the pictures).

I. Introduction to the Postclassic Mesoamerican World​

When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Maya country in 1519, little did he know that he had just run into the most sophisticated region of the Americas.

Mesoamerica in 1519 was home to more than fifteen million people,[1] scattered over a million square kilometers and divided into several hundred city-states[2] and one kingdom. The population densities were comparable to those of Spain, and the cities as peopled as Europe’s as a whole; only Ottoman Constantinople was larger than the Aztec capital of Tenōchtitlan, while others – such as Tlaxcallān (Tlaxcala) and Cholōllān (Cholula) – were comparable in size to London.[3] Whether they lived in cities or the countryside, all Mesoamericans were inheritors of four millennia’s worth of civilization.

The precolonial history of Mesoamerica is conventionally divided into the Preclassic (c. 2500 B.C.E – 250 C.E.), Classic (c. 250 – 900), and Postclassic eras (c. 900 – 1521). As the terminology suggests, generations of previous historians believed that the golden age of Mesoamerica had been centuries in the past when the Spaniards arrived. This was especially the case in Maya archaeology, where the Postclassic era was regularly called the “Decadent Period.” This undue focus on the Classic Age has also created a number of irritating myths about the supposed “disappearance” of the Maya, despite the said Maya making up 40% of the population of Guatemala today. Recent research has put these myths aside.

Far from being a “Decadent Period,” the two broad trends of Postclassic Mesoamerica may be summarized as development and integration.

(The Aztecs, Smith)

Why development? Let’s look at population change, a good marker of economic vitality in precolonial societies. In the Basin of Mexico, the heartland of the Aztec empire, the population is estimated to have sextupled (grown six times) in the three centuries from 1200 to 1519. The Basin’s 1519 population density outstripped that of Renaissance Lombardy, among the most densely inhabited areas of sixteenth-century Europe. There were no real cities in the Basin of Mexico in 1200; there were seven or eight in 1519, including the Aztec capital of Tenōchtitlan (more than 200,000 inhabitants), and together they were home to a third of the Basin’s million people. Supporting this immense population increase required equally immense agricultural intensification, “the transformation of the entire landscape as hills, plains, and swamps were all turned into productive plots for growing maize and other crops… virtually every non-mountainous area saw the construction of some combination of irrigation canals, raised fields, terraces, and house gardens, as well as fields for rainfall agriculture.” Rapid population increase and agricultural and industrial intensification have been archaeologically testified in most of Mesoamerica, not just the Basin.

Integration and development also marked statecraft. The Aztec empire is testimony to both. For the first time in at least a millennium, a single empire ruled over half the population of Mesoamerica. The Aztec project was thus fundamentally integrative, linking together cities and countries and peoples that had never before been ruled from one power. The level of control that Tenōchtitlan wielded over so many provinces was equally unprecedented. The Aztecs themselves recognized that they were doing something quite revolutionary. They believed in a prophecy that an ancient king had told them:

Call the Aztecs here!... They are the chosen people of their god and some day they will rule over all the nations of the earth.​

But the Aztec state was far from the most innovative of Postclassic Mesoamerican states. That honor goes to the western neighbors of the Aztecs, a people called the Tarascans, who, for likely the first time in Mesoamerican history, created a territorial kingdom.

Early 20th-century historian Edward Luttwak classified empires into two broad categories: territorial ones, which directly control and administer their subjects, and hegemonic ones, which rule indirectly through local elites. The Aztecs and almost all other Mesoamerican states were hegemonic. The Tarascans alone sought to administer large areas through a central bureaucracy.

(The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, Smith and Berdan)

According to Tarascan belief, all land in the kingdom belonged to the king. This was a notion unimaginable to the Aztecs, where even the metropolis of Tenōchtitlan belonged to two different and sovereign city-states. All provincial leaders in the Tarascan heartland had to be approved by the king, and their decisions could be overruled and the leaders themselves replaced at the whim of the court. To cripple the provincial elite from forging independent marriage alliances, these leaders were obliged to send their daughters to the court. The king himself decided who married whom. Taxes were collected directly from the population by central bureaucrats, even as the Aztecs were content with only a share in their vassal city-states’ income.

More impressively, the Tarascan state sought to progressively assimilate all other ethnicities under their rule into speaking their language and identifying as Tarascans. A nation-state, almost, to indulge in a little anachronism. By the early sixteenth century, to be a Tarascan was to be a subject of the Tarascan king. By contrast, the Nahuas, the ethnic group that the Aztecs belonged to, were separated into hundreds of city states, many of them actively hostile to the Aztec empire.

Postclassic culture was also marked by trans-regional integration. Virtually the entirety of Mesoamerica began to paint their books and pots and walls in a characteristic style that leading Mesoamericanists have dubbed the “Postclassic International Style.” Postclassic books relied heavily on ideograms over phonetic glyphs (i.e. they would draw a dog rather than spell out the word), allowing them to be understood by multilingual audiences. Ball courts and ball game rules became more uniform, while certain gods – like the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcohuātl to the Aztecs) and Our Flayed Lord (the Aztecs’ Xīpe Totēuc) – became popular across the region. It was this intense cultural exchange that made some Aztec philosophers “generate… the idea of highly abstract, invisible powers transcending the complex pantheons of deities that characterized Mesoamerica’s diverse religions.”

It is important to note that while the Postclassic was an epoch of prosperity and development for most of Mesoamerica, many areas still lagged behind their Classic heights. The Maya population in 1519 was likely lower than a thousand years before, while the Gulf Coast around modern Veracruz also saw fewer and more dispersed settlements. Nevertheless, in no way can we say that the Postclassic really was a “Decadent Period,” even for these areas alone.

This is because the most fundamental and far-ranging changes of the Postclassic era, pervading Maya country no less than Aztec or Tarascan territory, were commercial.


[1] Nobody knows how many people lived in Mesoamerica in 1519. Fifteen million is William T. Sanders’s guesstimate from the 1970s, and his reconstruction of the Basin of Mexico population as 1.16 million has proven far more accurate than the notion advanced by historians Borah and Cook that the Basin had three million people. Many Mesoamericanists seem to implicitly accept fifteen to twenty million as the most reasonable population estimate, with about a third to a half of that under Aztec rule. The “25 million Aztecs” statistic that has spread over the Internet is probably exaggerated. In any case, Mesoamericanists have grown out of trying to reconstruct the 1519 population. The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology is instructive:

The outlines of what happened do seem to be clear; a significant population was present, especially where there were complex, hierarchical societies. This population was then severely impacted by European diseases, conquest warfare, and Spanish colonial practices. It only took about a century after contact for much of the native population to be gone. The quantification of such terms as “significant,” “severely impacted,” and “depopulation ratio” is questionable…

The very high estimates of the pre-contact population and very high depopulation ratios have fallen out of favor… As several researchers have pointed out, to argue about whether 66, 75, or 95 percent were lost is unimportant. The post-conquest demographic history of Mesoamerica is a tragic one, and it has provided evidence of how new contact between humans can have terrible consequences.​

[2] “City-state” is misleading, but “kingdom” even more so. Postclassic states (āltepētl in Nahuatl, batabil in Maya, gueche in Zapotec, siña yye in Mixtec, and so forth) were usually small polities with a few tens of thousands of mostly rural inhabitants with a town at its center. More of a “town-state” than a “city-state,” but certainly not the larger entities the word “kingdom” evokes. Also, many Mesoamerican city-states had multiple rulers.

[3] To be fair, though, Mesoamerican cities did tend be smaller than the European average, though I’m not sure if this holds for the percentage of the population living in cities. Though the second-largest Maya city in the late Postclassic, Mayapán was home to only 20,000 people. On the other hand, the number of people subject to Mayapán was probably along the lines of 700,000 or so, which means that the capital was home to a similar share (3%) of the state’s population in both sixteenth-century England and the thirteenth-century Mayapán Confederacy.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

II. Postclassic Changes in Mesoamerican Commerce​

The most transformative process of Postclassic Mesoamerica was likely commercialization.

Though hard statistics are difficult to come by, it seems reasonably clear that Postclassic Mesoamerica saw an explosion in market density. The structure and function of markets will be explored further below, but one consequence that contrasts markedly with Classic Mesoamerica was a shift in the availability of prestige goods. The Classic elite had dominated the production and exchange of high-value goods like jade and featherwork. In the Postclassic market place, fine luxury goods were available for nobles and rich commoner merchants alike. Some states, like the Aztecs, tried to limit the threat that uppity merchants might pose to the social order by enforcing strict sumptuary laws.

Though these luxuries were still for only the richest merchants, there appears to have been a general increase in the disposable income of most Mesoamerican commoners during the Postclassic. Bulk imports like obsidian, salt, ceramics, and textiles were consumed by large numbers of commoners for likely the first time in Mesoamerican history. Archaeological surveys of virtually all fifteenth-century commoner households all over Mesoamerica yield ceramics exported from distant lands. Another sign of this commercialization is that Atlantic salt pans operating throughout the Classic period shut down in the late Postclassic without any apparent decline in demand. For the first time in history, fine white salt from the Yucatán was being imported in large enough quantities to outcompete the cheaper but low-quality local product. Archaeological studies of obsidian tell a similar story; the late Postclassic was the absolute height for production in almost all obsidian mines, with shaft and pit mines invented to meet the soaring demand. The Postclassic saw an increase in the variety as well as quantity of goods, with archaeologists discovering increasing differences in style and quality (and thus, presumably, prices) of obsidian and metal tools as the Postclassic progresses.

Ax money​

Currency circulated more widely and became more uniform. The use of cacao beans, square cotton cloth, and gold dust as money became widely accepted in territories under Aztec hegemony. The city-states of the Mixtecs (southern neighbors of the Aztecs) went one step further and began minting ax-shaped copper coins, the one and only coins in the ancient Americas. Even though these copper axes were rarely accepted in Tenōchtitlan or the Tarascan kingdom and many of them are too thin to be useful as anything but money, they remain the second most numerous metal artifact type in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and are regularly found in caches by the thousands – testimony to the level of commercialization even outside the imperial centers.

In this context of commerce, even the much-talked of “Maya Collapse” becomes what one historian called an “upward collapse”: a fundamental transformation of society that nonetheless produces a better society than what came before. Archaeologist Marilyn A. Masson notes that the main long-term result of the Classic Maya Collapse was the “lobbing off” of the god-kings and their nobility and their replacement by a “more collective distribution of wealth and social power.” Postclassic Maya kingdoms were less populated, but they were more technologically sophisticated, more economically and culturally integrated with the rest of the world, more secularized, and more practical with their architecture.

Postclassic Mesoamerica was not a “tribal” or “Stone Age” or “decadent” or “ossified” society.[4] It was a vigorous commercial society.

III. The Technology of Commerce​

For all this, the technology of commerce remained remarkably unsophisticated.

Mesoamerica had no domestic animals other than the dog, the turkey, and the honeybee. This meant that all overland transport used humans as beasts of burden.

As a matter of fact, humans are remarkably sturdy creatures. Porters in the Tarascan kingdom regularly carried loads of more than fifty kilograms (110 pounds) over distances of 21 to 43 kilometers (13 to 27 miles) per day, depending on terrain. The caravans of three thousand porters that some of the richer merchant used could thus transport four million cacao beans (enough money to buy 2,000 slaves!) at a pace only somewhat slower than mule-pulled carts, across terrain that mules would have trouble crossing.

Aztec depiction of a porter carrying a Spaniard

Still, porters were significantly less efficient than mules. Mules can eat grass and feed themselves for free, while humans must carry their own food or buy it. Mules can carry heavier loads. Unlike animals, porters (most of whom were freemen) had to be paid wages and so were doubly expensive. Mesoamerica also did not use the wheel for anything more than toys, since it is not particularly useful in the hilly terrain without animals to pull it. It is hard to deny that porters were not as efficient as Eurasian caravans, and the level of commercialization in Postclassic Mesoamerica, integrated mainly by land routes, becomes that much more impressive.

The alternative is water transport. The issues are that there are few navigable rivers in Mesoamerica, and the ones that exist neither corresponded to major trade routes nor flowed by the major centers of population and production. Nonetheless, canoes – which could carry several tons of cargo – were widely used along the coastline, in lakes, and in rivers where they existed. Postclassic Mesoamericans seem to have been more willing to head out to sea than their ancestors, perhaps because of advances in maritime technology (rowlocks, raised hulls and sterns, on-board structures, etc., though I’m not sure if these were truly Postclassic inventions). The large-scale Postclassic trade in coastal salt was possible only because of the canoe.

Still, even Postclassic Mesoamericans lacked the outrigger, a stabilizing structure along the length of the canoe. Absent the outrigger, Mesoamerican canoes would have easily capsized had they had a sail attached. Sails were also inconvenient in the mangrove swamps of the Mesoamerican coastline. This meant that there were no sailboats in Mesoamerica, only canoes with paddles and oars. Mesoamerica’s canoes, mind you, were also significantly smaller than Polynesian ones.

On both land and sea, Mesoamerican transportation was far less efficient than Old World systems. The solution was not to stop trading, but to increase the density of marketplaces.


[4] Archaeologists of the Americas do not use the Neolithic-Bronze Age-Iron Age division. This “three-age” system is of limited utility outside the Middle Eastern and European context for which it was devised; it is completely useless in the Americas, brings only confusion in an African context, and is partially unnecessary in China (where there was no societal rupture between the Bronze and Iron Ages).

 

[Every Grass in Java]

IV. The Organization of Commerce​

The marketplace was the heart of the Mesoamerican economy.

Marketplace density in Central Mexico when Cortés strolled in was very high, with the average village within an hour’s walk to one marketplace or another. Most were held every five days, with neighboring markets often operating on alternating cycles to prevent merchants and locals from having to choose between two different markets held simultaneously. This enabled consumers to purchase imports and merchants to make a profit despite the exorbitant costs of transportation. Some urban markets, on the other hand, operated on a permanent basis. The most famous example is the Tlatelolco marketplace in the Aztec capital of Tenōchtitlan, which daily attracted sixty thousand people.

Depiction of the Tlatelolco marketplace

Almost all peasant households regularly visited the marketplace and had enough money to spend on trinkets and baubles as well as utilitarian goods. To quote the Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America: An Encyclopedia,

Excavations of Aztec commoner houses in both urban and rural settings have turned up rich and diverse domestic artifact inventories that typically include abundant imported goods, such as foreign ceramic and obsidian… Commoners could buy almost anything they wanted in the markets, and only a few types of special jewelry and clothing were restricted to the nobility. Commoners obtained not only exotic pottery and obsidian, but also jade beads, shell necklaces, and other luxury goods through the markets, and these items turn up in excavations of Aztec commoner houses.​

This was aided by the government’s light touch on the market. There was a market tax in Aztec country, but it was minimal, likely only enough to pay the salaries of the officials who kept order in the marketplace. Mixtec kings probably did not tax their markets. Still, the marketplace was crucial to basic state operations because it allowed the in-kind taxes (taxes paid in goods, not money) from the provinces to be exchanged for other necessities. The Aztecs probably didn’t demand 160,000 rubber balls from one province just for ball games, if you get what I mean. This is also why Aztec rulers sometimes funded new provincial markets to redirect the flow of trade and deny basic goods to their enemies.

The state intervened primarily by installing magistrates, often senior merchants, who made sure that the goods were of passable quality and passed sentences on cases of theft and fraud. Cortés reports that in the Tlatelolco market of Tenōchtitlan,

A very fine building in the great square serves as a kind of audience chamber where ten or a dozen persons are always seated, as judges who deliberate on all cases arising in the market and pass sentence on evildoers… There are officials who continually walk amongst the people inspecting goods exposed for sale and the measures by which they are sold, on certain occasions I have seen them destroy measures which were false.​

It was similar in southern Maya country:

The [Maya] rulers took great pains that there should be held great and celebrated and very rich fairs and markets, because at these come together many things; those who are in need of something will find it there and can be exchanged with those other necessary things: they held their fairs and exhibited what they had for sale close to the temples… A judge presided over the market, to see that nobody was exploited. He appraised the prices and he knew of everything, which was presented at the market.​

Who was there in the Mesoamerican market? The largest segment of both buyers and sellers were peasants, selling their own surplus crops, the plants and animals they gathered, hunted, and fished, and handicrafts made for the market during agricultural off-seasons. Postclassic population increases outstripped agricultural output in many parts of Mesoamerica, requiring large numbers of peasants to engage in small-scale manufacturing industries. Archaeological excavations in the Morelos Valley (a region of Central Mexico conquered by the Aztecs) suggests that local cotton textile production doubled or tripled in the three centuries from 1200 to 1500. While most production occurred at home, saltworks and obsidian mines may have hired professionals and operated workshops. Archaeologists have deemed Postclassic production of both salt and obsidian to be “industrial.”

The Mesoamerican market also featured large numbers of regional merchants, professionals who specialized in transporting large quantities of specific bulk goods like salt, cotton, and cacao to marketplaces within their local area. It was these itinerant individuals who were directly responsible for supplying the thousands of local markets dotting Mesoamerica with foreign goods in high demand. Their integration of regional commerce also allowed areas to specialize in specific goods: dogs in Acolman, ceramics and textiles in Tetzcoco, slaves in Āzcapōtzalco, Xōchimīlco for jewelry, the Morelos Valley for raw cotton…

Finally, the million square kilometers of Mesoamerica were knit together by elite long-distance merchants, called pochteca by the Aztecs, mayapeti by the Tarascans, and ppolom by the northern Maya. The Aztec pochteca and Tarascan mayapeti were legally commoners but richer than many nobles, and the former could attain prestige equivalent to that of the warrior nobility by successfully carrying out four of the extravagant human sacrifice rituals called the Bathing of Slaves. Some historians have speculated that the pochteca and the mayapeti were on their way to becoming a commercial middle class analogue to the European bourgeois when the Spaniards arrived. In most other parts of Mesoamerica, long-distance traders were nobles or royalty.

Whether nobles or commoners, these merchants dealt in both high-value luxuries for elite consumption and in the bulk necessities that the regional retailing merchants purchased and supplied to countryside consumers. Elite merchant capital was sufficient to maintain permanent networks of commercial factors in distant areas and hire professionals to haggle with suppliers and collect outstanding payments. Despite their commoner status, some pochteca appear to have operated paramilitary forces and intervened in foreign succession struggles. Elite merchants also gave out loans and, at least for the pochteca, probably demanded interest in return.

Stylized depiction of an armed Maya merchant

As mentioned, cacao beans and cotton cloth were the main denominations of Aztec currency, and larger marketplaces featured money changers who converted one currency for another or goods into equivalent currency. We know that the economy was sufficiently monetized that laws had to be passed to punish merchants who were creating counterfeit cacao beans stuffed with dirt or sawdust or mixing in poor-quality cloth in between higher-quality ones. Both the cacao bean and the cotton cloth came close to being universal currencies widely accepted throughout Mesoamerica.

A final word on factor markets. Mesoamerica did not have a proper land market. The Tarascans believed all land belonged to the king; the Maya probably did not believe in land as a viable unit of purchase. Rich Aztec individuals did buy and sell land at increasing levels, but most land was still communally held upon the arrival of the Spaniards. Most labor was similarly bound up in community and household ties and state obligations, although wage labor does seem to have been increasing throughout the Late Postclassic. There were limits to Mesoamerican commercial development.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

V. Mesoamerican Commerce in Global Context and Potential Development​

What can we say about the Postclassic Mesoamerican economy from a comparative perspective? The Princeton sociologist Gilbert Rozman usefully classifies preindustrial commercial economies into seven stages. Rozman specialized in the urban development of Russia and East Asia and illustrates how they would fit in his framework:

1. Stage A: Pre-urban. Stage A societies have no cities. Rozman’s examples: Early Slavic tribes, Neolithic China, Kofun-period Japan.

2. Stage B: Tribute cities. Only one city in the economy with “weak control over the resources of the countryside.” Rozman’s examples: Early Kievan Rus’, Shang China, Asuka-period Japan.

3. Stage C: State cities. Two levels of cities (a capital and a subordinate town), part of “a formal administrative hierarchy… The existence of two levels of cities facilitate the regular movement of goods and manpower.” Rozman’s example: Spring-and-Autumn China. Rozman believed that Russia and Japan had skipped Stage C through Byzantine and Tang influence.

4. Stage D: Imperial cities. Two to four levels of cities and a maturation of administrative hierarchies. Though Stage D capitals may hold hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, cities still serve primarily as administrative centers supported through state power. Rozman’s examples: Late Kievan and Mongol Rus’, Han China, Heian Japan.

5. Stage E: Standard marketing. Four to five levels of cities and marketplaces. Urban development begins to respond to commercial pressures more than administrative ones. “The beginning of what I label commercial centralization… The widespread appearance of periodic markets in settlements miles removed from administrative centers mark the onset of stage E societies… Life in most villages is significantly affected by the development of nearby markets making possible the regular buying and selling of goods.” Rozman’s examples: Fifteenth-century Russia, late Tang China, Kamakura Japan.

6. Stage F: Intermediate marketing. Five to six levels of cities and marketplaces, with “larger numbers of periodic marketing places, including a new level of intermediate marketing center… greater integration of local standard markets under more substantial intermediate markets… cities acquire correspondingly greater commercial activities as the centers of expanding networks of markets.” Rozman’s examples: Sixteenth-century Russia, Song China, Muromachi Japan.

7. Stage G: National marketing. Seven levels of cities and marketplaces, the most complex and integrative form of preindustrial commercialization. Rozman’s examples: Eighteenth-century Russia, Ming and Qing China, Tokugawa Japan.​

In 1519, the Mesoamerican market system had four levels of markets: the metropolis of Tenōchtitlan, large cities like Tetzcoco, small cities/large towns like Acolman, and the village markets. At the same time, it is hard to deny that 1519 Mesoamerica featured “widespread appearance of periodic markets.” It is also clear that Mesoamerican “life in most villages was significantly affected by the development of nearby markets making possible the regular buying and selling of goods.”

Indeed, the ratio of marketplaces to population in the Basin of Mexico in 1519 exceeds the ratio of marketplaces to population in 1050 Song China, which Rozman classifies as a Stage F society.

(This isn’t a fair comparison because the Basin of Mexico is much smaller than China and was the most populated and economically advanced part of the Americas, but the Aztec economy was clearly far from being “thousands of years behind” the Song.)

In Rozman’s schema, Postclassic Mesoamerica corresponds most closely to Stage E: Standard Marketing, the moment when commercial development begins to exert a stronger force on urbanization than the vagaries of administration.

Some other examples of what historians have classified as Stage E societies:

• Eleventh-century France and England (Rozman, “Urban Networks”)
• Roman Italy in Classical Antiquity (Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland; Ligt, Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire)
• Seventeenth-century Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam (Lieberman, Strange Parallels)

Certainly, in terms of metallurgy, or historiography, or transportation, or a gazillion other things, Mesoamerica does not compare to the Old World. But in matters of commerce and the economy, fifteenth-century Mesoamerica was not far behind much of late medieval Eurasia and actively ahead of some places, including Southeast Asia and Korea.

This being an alternate history site, we might ponder a few counterfactuals.

What if Europeans had never arrived in Mesoamerica? What if Eurasia sank into the sea in October 1492, disregarding the catastrophic effect that would have on climate?

Well, we’ll never know for sure. It is probable that the political integration of the Postclassic era would have continued. We know the Aztecs had plans to conquer the Maya and take over the remaining independent states of Central Mexico when the Spaniards arrived. The Tarascans were probably far too strong to conquer within the sixteenth century. The Aztec project to “rule over all the nations of the earth” would probably not have succeeded, and I have my doubts on whether their empire could have survived the droughts of the late sixteenth century. Still, the Aztec legacy would persevere – most Mesoamericans would remember their wealth and power as something to emulate, and Nahuatl, the Aztec language, would almost certainly remain the Mesoamerican lingua franca even after the empire’s collapse.

I do think it likely that there would have been some kind of pan-Mesoamerican empire eventually, whether a very lucky Aztec state or some other one centuries later. As a vast horse-less empire, it would have followed the Aztec mode of hegemonic rule out of necessity. But perhaps its central heartland would have been governed directly, as the Tarascans had done.

Commercial development would have continued. Land sales and wage labor were expanding in the fifteenth century and there is no reason to believe these would have stopped, though the eventual collapse of the Aztec state might have led to temporary depopulation and breakdown in economic networks. I doubt that there would have been cities much larger than Tenōchtitlan for at least centuries after the Aztecs, but the intermediate range (the cities between Tenōchtitlan’s 200,000 people and Tetzcoco’s 25,000) would have been filled quicker. Rozman’s Stage F would have been eventually reached. None of us, of course, can tell when exactly that would have been.

Technology would respond to commercial and state demand, as it did in the Postclassic era. It is unlikely that metal utilitarian goods would have been widely produced, nor that iron would have been adopted. Most Postclassic Mesoamerican cultures judged metals based on aesthetic criteria, especially sound (the Tarascans really liked bells). Iron is ugly and iron bells objectively sound bad. I am dubious whether any Mesoamericans would have used iron in 2018. This is not because the Aztecs and their contemporaries were “primitive” or “at a Stone Age level,” but because they were a commercial society that happened to have little demand for ugly metals.

What if Europe had arrived and simply failed to conquer the Aztecs?

(Let's leave aside how plausible that might be.)

Some level of demographic catastrophe seems inevitable, if not the 93%-dead-in-a-century scale that we saw IOTL. On what scale? It’s hard to be sure. Perhaps uncolonized Mesoamerica would have undergone something more along the lines of colonial Ecuador’s population decline (76% in a century). If we’re being overly optimistic, we could even imagine a population decline on the scale of the Spanish Philippines: a mortality rate of “only” 41% in the first ninety years. (Spanish colonialism was also devastating in the Philippines, though much less so than in the Americas.)

The colonization of Mesoamerica was tragic not only for the huge scale of death in the first century after conquest, but also because indigenous populations failed to recover throughout the colonial period. The Basin of Mexico’s population hit rock bottom in 1650, with only 70,000 Nahuas left (a 93-94% population decline in four generations). There was still merely 120,000 a hundred years later. In 1800, the Indian population had recovered to 285,000, still a shadow of its former self. Similarly, the northern Maya population in 1809 was 290,000 – a mere 36% of the 1492 population.

Had indigenous political and economic structures survived, perhaps population recovery would have happened much faster, been much quicker, and worked on a grander scale without the extortions of the colonial system.

In the end, though, what happened is what happened. Tenōchtitlan was razed, Mesoamerica de-peopled, and a three-thousand-year experiment in independent civilization came to an end.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

VI. Sources​

Introductions to Mesoamerica as a whole, the Postclassic era and economy, or notable Postclassic states:

• The Postclassic Mesoamerican World, edited by Smith and Berdan. University of Utah Press, 2003. Possibly the single best resource out there specifically about the Postclassic.
• Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America: An Encyclopedia, edited by Evans and Webster. Routledge, 2013.
• The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, Carmack, Gasco, and Gossen. Routledge, 2016.
• The Aztecs: Third Edition, Smith. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• The Aztec Economic World: Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, Hirth. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• The Essential Codex Mendoza, Berdan and Anawalt. University of California Press, 1997. Key primary source.
• Taríacuri's Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State, Pollard. University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
• In the Realm of Nachan Kan: Postclassic Maya Archaeology at Laguna de On, Belize, Masson. University Press of Colorado, 2000. About a Maya port-state in modern Belize.
• Kukulcan’s Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapán, Masson and Lope. University Press of Colorado, 2014.

For specific claims and points:

• City sizes: “City Size in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica,” Smith (Journal of Urban History, 2005)
• “Decadent Period”: TPCMW, p. 9-10
• Population increase in the Basin of Mexico: The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Sanders, Parsons, and Santley
• Aztec prophecy: The History of the Indies of New Spain, Durán (University of Oklahoma Press 1994 translation), p. 55
• Tarascan administration: Taríacuri's Legacy; TPCMW, p. 78-87, 227-238; “Ethnicity and Political Control in a Complex Society,” Pollard, in Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Cultural integration: TPCMW, p. 181-225; Astronomers, Scribes, and Priests, Vail and Hernandez (Harvard University Press, 2010)
• Aztec philosophy: Aztec Thought and Culture, León-Portilla (University of Oklahoma Press, 1963); Aztec Philosophy, Maffie (University Press of Colorado, 2013). I didn’t feel the latter book was very historical though. Quote is from p. 148, TLoM.
• Dispersed Gulf Coast settlements: “Imperial and Social Relations in Postclassic South Central Veracruz, Mexico,” Garraty and Stark (Latin American Antiquity, 2002)
• Postclassic changes in the economy: TPCMW, p. 93-180, 225-297 (p. 131-159 for obsidian production, p. 159-172 for metal production including ax coins, p. 126-131, 259-269 for salt)
• Classic Maya Collapse as “upward collapse”: Nachan Kan, p. 267-277
• Porters: TAEW, p. 239-243
• Canoes and their lack of sails: “Canoes and Navigation of the Maya and Their Neighbours,” Thompson (The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1949), which is a useful resource but erroneously argues the Maya had sailed ships; “Sails in Aboriginal Mesoamerica: Reevaluating Thompson's Argument,” Epstein (American Anthropologist, 1990), for Mesoamerican lack of sails.
• Marketplace density: TAEM, p. 290-292
• Government intervention: TAEM, p. 75-79; Kukulcan, p. 282-284
• Types of Mesoamerican merchants: TAEM, p. 90-237; Kukulcan, p. 284-285; TPCMW, p. 102-103
• Pochteca paramilitaries: See, e.g., the 1543 Memoria de Don Melchor Caltzin, an enigmatic text written in the Tarascan language. “It was then [in 1454] that twenty great merchants, who had people at their service, entered here at Tzintzuntzan [the Tarascan capital]… They protected themselves because in ancient times there was great danger on the road… He [the Tarascan monarch Tzitzispandáquare] gathered them [the merchants] in the territory. The poles with the severed heads were seen erected. The war club got them [i.e. Tzitzispandáquare requested the merchants for help in his war]… The twenty great merchants were diligent, were large. They robbed, destroyed, they entered. And because of this, they all collected a great fortune.” The Memoria implies that the “great merchants” were tecos, i.e. Nahuas.
• Currency: Aztecs, p. 116-119; TAEW, p. 243-254; Kukulcan, p. 285-288
• Land tenure: The Nahuas After the Conquest, Lockhart (Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 141-163; Maya Lords and Lordship, Quezada, translated by Rugeley (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), p. 16-21
• Rozman model: Quotes from “Urban Networks and Historical Stages,” Rozman (The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1979); see also Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Rozman (Princeton University Press, 1974); Urban Networks in Russia, 1750-1800 (Princeton University Press, 1976)
• Aztec central places: Aztecs, p. 113; “The Basin of Mexico Market System and the Growth of Empire,” Blanton, in Aztec Imperial Strategies (Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia and Colloquia, 1996)
• Ecuador population decline: Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador, Newson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995)
• Philippines population decline: Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, Newson (University of Hawaii Press, 2009)
• Basin of Mexico population collapse: Mexico: Volume 2, The Colonial Era, Knight (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 206-208
• Maya population collapse and recovery: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648 – 1812, Patch (Stanford University Press). The Maya pattern was atypical. Initial contact was also catastrophic, with an estimated <71% population decline in the first three decades of conquest. The rate of population decline then drastically slowed, so that the 1601 population was still 70% of the 1550 population. After 1601, the population began to recover, returning to the 1550 population in 1643. However, yellow fever was introduced for the first time in 1648, followed by famine in 1652 and smallpox in 1654. The population hit a new nadir of 100,000 (13% of the precolonial population) in the 1660s, remained stagnant for a generation, then recovered rapidly, reaching 300,000 by 1809. The 1809 population was the largest it had been since the 1540s, but it was still barely a third of the 1519 population.

 

[xsampa]

That's a pretty detailed article you wrote there. I think you're right suggesting that the Mexica would become an empire that would give rise to future empires, but what about an "Interregnal period" of Spanish vassalization/enforced balkanization in between? Although the Mexica were a relatively wealthy and populous state, the suppressed rivalry between the Mexica and their subordinate altepetl stills exists, and could be exploited by the Spanish.

 

[Faeelin]

Fascinating. Thank you.

 

[Dargonaut]

Very exhaustive, I'm liking the pro-Native American pods we've been getting recently.

 

[redeclipse]

If someone else shows up instead who doesn't go all out like the Spaniards, they have a better chance of remaining an independent civilization. Italian city states that trade with them, or something maybe.

 

[Gloss]

Really well done essay, I have a couple of ideas for the last point:

What if Europe had arrived and simply failed to conquer the Aztecs?

(Let's leave aside how plausible that might be.)

Some level of demographic catastrophe seems inevitable, if not the 93%-dead-in-a-century scale that we saw IOTL. On what scale? It’s hard to be sure. Perhaps uncolonized Mesoamerica would have undergone something more along the lines of colonial Ecuador’s population decline (76% in a century). If we’re being overly optimistic, we could even imagine a population decline on the scale of the Spanish Philippines: a mortality rate of “only” 41% in the first ninety years. (Spanish colonialism was also devastating in the Philippines, though much less so than in the Americas.)

The colonization of Mesoamerica was tragic not only for the huge scale of death in the first century after conquest, but also because indigenous populations failed to recover throughout the colonial period. The Basin of Mexico’s population hit rock bottom in 1650, with only 70,000 Nahuas left (a 93-94% population decline in four generations). There was still merely 120,000 a hundred years later. In 1800, the Indian population had recovered to 285,000, still a shadow of its former self. Similarly, the northern Maya population in 1809 was 290,000 – a mere 36% of the 1492 population.

Had indigenous political and economic structures survived, perhaps population recovery would have happened much faster, been much quicker, and worked on a grander scale without the extortions of the colonial system.

In the end, though, what happened is what happened. Tenōchtitlan was razed, Mesoamerica de-peopled, and a three-thousand-year experiment in independent civilization came to an end.

I really wonder how much in % we give the blame Spanish rule for the post-initial shock population stagnation, I mean you mention the droughts and we would have to factor in the little ice age during this period too and the lack of European migration and importation of African slaves as well, even if we look at a 50% casualty rate during the first decades or first century we are looking around 2 centuries of recovery, if more casualties happen probably even more, it's true that it would still mean having in 1800 or 1850 a Mesoamerican population composed of natives only that we didn't see even in terms of total population until the mid 20th century in some places, but it would be hardly a quick recover.

What I am really curious off is what would happen politically and diplomatically between Atlantic Europeans in general and Mesoamericans, it's likely there would be an infusion of new practices both ways but it's also possible that Europeans would be prone to play sides causing instability during a time stability was maybe the only way to have the population not resemble a post apocalyptic one.

I find hard to believe that with contact with Europe the Aztec coalition would survive in their 1520 territorial extent, the basin would be perfect ground for diseases to spread and the droughts would be particularly devastating here I suppose, from that point of view I think Nahuatl would actually be less prestigious as the Spaniards IOTL made it even official, if the Aztec decline and are replaced in part by territorial kingdom like the Tarascans I think we will see a regional consolidation of various groups, altough it's also unlikely that Nahuatl would be replaced lingusitically with another group but I guess it's possible to have smoething similar to the initial migration of Nahuatl groups in the area with another ethnci group if the population decline is large enough.

I wonder what would happen religiously, from one side I'm skeptical of native religions surviving, not because of the inevetability of monotheistic or organized religions to win out but because historically I don't think we have any case of such thing happening even with situation more favourable to the retention of native held religions, but if someone disagrees feel free to argue your case. In any case I wonder how fast they would convert, how the religion would shape them and their practices(flower wars) and how they would shape the religion, how frustrated the European priests would be at the sign of syncretism everywhere, which denomination they would end up being and the politics of it etc.

 

[Thanksforallthefish]

Really good to see more interest in native american history and TLs! This is fascinating and useful. Thank you!

 

[Lenwe]

Fifteen million? I'm all mesoamérica? From more or less OTL Jalisco to OTL Tegucigalpa? If anything I find that number quite low. Tenochtitlán Alone have some Half million inhabitans, and The Aztec Empire some 7-9 million.

 

[Gloss]

Fifteen million? I'm all mesoamérica? From more or less OTL Jalisco to OTL Tegucigalpa? If anything I find that number quite low. Tenochtitlán Alone have some Half million inhabitans, and The Aztec Empire some 7-9 million.

Tenochtitlan did not have 500k people, wtf. The highest number I've seen in 300k but 200k is more likely.

 

[Lenwe]

Tenochtitlan did not have 500k people, wtf. The highest number I've seen in 300k but 200k is more likely.

200 k after The Spanish Conquest, two Plagues and a Siege, that killed at least half the population. if we Accept 200k in The city proper, in middle of the lake,we have to remember there we're at least three other cities in the region, plus all The Villages and hamlets in The lake coast, I explained myself badly I Mean Half Million in Tenochtitlán and her Closet Satélite towns in the isles like mexico-tlatelcoco

 

[Gloss]

It was not 200k after conquest, after conquest it was not even a fraction of that, in any case the estimations OP presented are not an undercount by any means.

 

[Gloss]

Did discussion already die down? I feel like this essay deserves more discussion considering its depth and the effort that was put into.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

even if we look at a 50% casualty rate during the first decades or first century we are looking around 2 centuries of recovery, if more casualties happen probably even more

Two centuries is too much. Let's try a few comparisons.

Per Newson's data for the Philippines (Conquest and Pestilence, p. 256-257), the colonial population in the archipelago more than doubled in the eighteenth century after hitting its 1700 nadir, rising to 110% of its precolonial level after a sustained population decline of 41% in the dozen decades following conquest. Or consider the actual population recovery of eighteenth-century New Spain. In most areas, an annual increase of around 1% for the native population is attested:

• Michoacán, the majority of what was once the Tarascan kingdom, saw the native population triple in the eighteenth century. (Morin, Michoacán en la Nueva España)
• The Nahua population of the Basin of Mexico, once the Aztec heartland, quadrupled from 70,000 in 1650 to 275,000 in 1800. (see above)
• In the Mixteca Alta, formerly the heartland of the Mixtec people but an impoverished and neglected hinterland under Spanish rule, the Mixtec population nevertheless increased by 153% in thirteen decades, from 30,000 in 1670 to 76,000 in 1803. (Cook and Borah, The Population of the Mixteca Alta; Cook and Borah's estimates for the sixteenth century are too high and unreliable)
• Population recovery was unusually slow in the Cuchumatán highlands of Guatemala, with an increase of merely 72% from 1683 to 1779.
• The Maya population of the Yucatán, as mentioned above, tripled in the eighteenth century.

Losses on a scale of 50% of the population could easily be recouped in a century or so, possibly even less depending on how stable and how extortive the native government is compared to the Spaniards. It's what happened in the Philippines, after all.

The absolute best case scenario is Jesuit Paraguay. The Jesuits operated missions to Christianize the semi-nomadic Guaraní people of Paraguay for more than a century, from the early seventeenth century until the suppression of the Society in 1767. Most Guaraní bands willingly joined the Jesuit missions; as harsh and doctrinal as the Jesuits could be, they alone protected the Indians from slavers, and the average Jesuit was a far more competent ruler than the average Spaniard or Portuguese. Unlike most Europeans and Guaranís, the Jesuits were also somewhat medically competent.

After the mid-seventeenth century, the Guaraní population under Jesuit rule was not significantly affected by immigration. The Jesuit missions were chronically underfunded and had barely enough people to tend to the existing mission population, never mind convince or coerce unwilling bands to join. One census reveals that less than 0.2% of the Guaranís under Jesuit rule in 1735 were immigrants from within the previous twenty years. What immigration did exist was probably balanced out by the slow trickle of mission inhabitants who voluntarily returned to jungle life.

So we have a large native population living under a strict Catholic theocracy for five generations. Thinking back to what happened in Mesoamerica or the Andes, you might expect catastrophic results. But...

Through mainly natural increase, the Guaraní population in the Jesuit missions increased by 371% in ninety years.

The big drop represents a catastrophic smallpox epidemic, drought, and the Revolt of the Comuneros in the 1730s, which together halved the mission population. Tragic, but the history of the native peoples of the Americas after 1492 is littered with tragedies. What is more significant is that upward slope in the 1740s. The population recovered by 42% in fifteen years, representing an annual growth rate of 2.4%.

The native residents of the Jesuit missions were a remarkably healthy population. The Jesuits promoted teen marriage; almost all Guaraní boys and girls in the missions married at seventeen and fifteen, respectively, and there were almost no bachelors over the age of twenty. This universal early marriage meant that the average number of children for Guaraní women was 7.7. At the same time, the Jesuits and the Guaraní chiefs cooperated to make Jesuit Paraguay a remarkably prosperous area. The missions had a monopoly on yerba mate tea production, and the Jesuit leadership invested their wealth for their communities in turn, building elegant churches, brick houses, even paved roads. The impact of Jesuit rule on the Guaraní population becomes clearer after the suppression of the Society in 1767; there were epidemics similar in scale to those of the 1730s after 1767, but the population was never so quick to recover as in the 1740s.

(Sarreal's The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History is probably the best recent resource on this.)

What all this means is that, given sufficiently stable and non-extortive conditions, it is plausible for the Mesoamerican population to fully recover from a 80% population collapse within a century.

It is very unlikely that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mesoamerica under native rule would have anything even remotely as stable as the Jesuit mission system. The Jesuits themselves failed to replicate their success elsewhere; the death rate exceeded the birth rate in most of their other native missions. However, Mesoamerica also had a more complex and resilient society than the Guaraní ever did, while Mesoamerican living conditions under native rule would likely equal, if not exceed, crowded and regimented Guaraní life in the missions. A 371% growth rate is too much, but I do believe the evidence suggests Mesoamerican populations would have bounced back much faster if the deck wasn't so stacked against them in the Spanish racial hierarchy.

 

[Lenwe]

SNIP.

The Jesuit elsewhere weren't as successful as they were in Paraguay, but all their Misiones were center of education and develop in the Continent, were they educated and teach trades to all the people around them, their expulsion of America was a low blow to the continent.
And then they Say i´m extremist when propose that the Spanish Domain over Latina america is the principal culprit of the low level of demographic growth and the constant Depopulation of the continent, process that was not stopped until the Independence.

Great Update @Every Grass in Java
(ans still I consider your working populations before the Spanish are too low )

 

[Gloss]

Two centuries is too much. Let's try a few comparisons.

Per Newson's data for the Philippines (Conquest and Pestilence, p. 256-257), the colonial population in the archipelago more than doubled in the eighteenth century after hitting its 1700 nadir, rising to 110% of its precolonial level after a sustained population decline of 41% in the dozen decades following conquest. Or consider the actual population recovery of eighteenth-century New Spain. In most areas, an annual increase of around 1% for the native population is attested:

Well I'm not sure why we would assume the growth would happen earlier without the Spanish, the encomienda was abolished earlier than that and racial hierarchy laws didn't really change, if it's a climate problem then the factors would remain the same regardless of the Spanish.

• Michoacán, the majority of what was once the Tarascan kingdom, saw the native population triple in the eighteenth century. (Morin, Michoacán en la Nueva España)
• The Nahua population of the Basin of Mexico, once the Aztec heartland, quadrupled from 70,000 in 1650 to 275,000 in 1800. (see above)
• In the Mixteca Alta, formerly the heartland of the Mixtec people but an impoverished and neglected hinterland under Spanish rule, the Mixtec population nevertheless increased by 153% in thirteen decades, from 30,000 in 1670 to 76,000 in 1803. (Cook and Borah, The Population of the Mixteca Alta; Cook and Borah's estimates for the sixteenth century are too high and unreliable)
• Population recovery was unusually slow in the Cuchumatán highlands of Guatemala, with an increase of merely 72% from 1683 to 1779.
• The Maya population of the Yucatán, as mentioned above, tripled in the eighteenth century.

You can see how most cases involve regrwoth after the mid 17th century and involve smaller groups, also is this based on archeology or censuses?

Losses on a scale of 50% of the population could easily be recouped in a century or so, possibly even less depending on how stable and how extortive the native government is compared to the Spaniards. It's what happened in the Philippines, after all.

The diseases will not go away during this time, even the Spanish in the mainland had suffered greatly for it during this time(like the plague of Sevilla).

Taking the example of a non war free society, Europe required a century and a half to recover from a mere 33% population decline, I'm not sure how the natives, that experienced a larger population decline over a larger period(even using the 50% figure which is to me impossible), can recover before 2-3 centuries after the first epidemics happen.

The absolute best case scenario is Jesuit Paraguay. The Jesuits operated missions to Christianize the semi-nomadic Guaraní people of Paraguay for more than a century, from the early seventeenth century until the suppression of the Society in 1767. Most Guaraní bands willingly joined the Jesuit missions; as harsh and doctrinal as the Jesuits could be, they alone protected the Indians from slavers, and the average Jesuit was a far more competent ruler than the average Spaniard or Portuguese. Unlike most Europeans and Guaranís, the Jesuits were also somewhat medically competent.

After the mid-seventeenth century, the Guaraní population under Jesuit rule was not significantly affected by immigration. The Jesuit missions were chronically underfunded and had barely enough people to tend to the existing mission population, never mind convince or coerce unwilling bands to join. One census reveals that less than 0.2% of the Guaranís under Jesuit rule in 1735 were immigrants from within the previous twenty years. What immigration did exist was probably balanced out by the slow trickle of mission inhabitants who voluntarily returned to jungle life.

So we have a large native population living under a strict Catholic theocracy for five generations. Thinking back to what happened in Mesoamerica or the Andes, you might expect catastrophic results. But...

Through mainly natural increase, the Guaraní population in the Jesuit missions increased by 371% in ninety years.

The big drop represents a catastrophic smallpox epidemic, drought, and the Revolt of the Comuneros in the 1730s, which together halved the mission population. Tragic, but the history of the native peoples of the Americas after 1492 is littered with tragedies. What is more significant is that upward slope in the 1740s. The population recovered by 42% in fifteen years, representing an annual growth rate of 2.4%.

The native residents of the Jesuit missions were a remarkably healthy population. The Jesuits promoted teen marriage; almost all Guaraní boys and girls in the missions married at seventeen and fifteen, respectively, and there were almost no bachelors over the age of twenty. This universal early marriage meant that the average number of children for Guaraní women was 7.7. At the same time, the Jesuits and the Guaraní chiefs cooperated to make Jesuit Paraguay a remarkably prosperous area. The missions had a monopoly on yerba mate tea production, and the Jesuit leadership invested their wealth for their communities in turn, building elegant churches, brick houses, even paved roads. The impact of Jesuit rule on the Guaraní population becomes clearer after the suppression of the Society in 1767; there were epidemics similar in scale to those of the 1730s after 1767, but the population was never so quick to recover as in the 1740s.

(Sarreal's The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History is probably the best recent resource on this.)

Like you say later we can safely disregard this case, it's an outlier involving specific circumstances, to me this caseseems so useless because I have hard time believing you can achieve something like this without foreign military protection or on a scale 20 times bigger.

What all this means is that, given sufficiently stable and non-extortive conditions, it is plausible for the Mesoamerican population to fully recover from a 80% population collapse within a century.

I again disagree, this Jesuit case is not simply "stable", it's an outright natalist society, virtually war free and isolated from others. It is in theory possible, but not plausible in the slightest. This idea is a bit ridiculous, this is an outlier case that appears to not have worked elsewhere, also I'd say htat among the factors the natalist policies and apparent economic prosperity seem to be far more fitting to explain why the growth was so large.

It is very unlikely that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mesoamerica under native rule would have anything even remotely as stable as the Jesuit mission system. The Jesuits themselves failed to replicate their success elsewhere; the death rate exceeded the birth rate in most of their other native missions. However, Mesoamerica also had a more complex and resilient society than the Guaraní ever did, while Mesoamerican living conditions under native rule would likely equal, if not exceed, crowded and regimented Guaraní life in the missions. A 371% growth rate is too much, but I do believe the evidence suggests Mesoamerican populations would have bounced back much faster if the deck wasn't so stacked against them in the Spanish racial hierarchy.

Why would the racial hierarchy cause slower to no growth throughout the whole period? The encomienda was abolished by the 17th century, so on that front the pressure was alleviated on the natives and yet they didn't really grow to their original levels. It's not like the Spanish population grew during this time either, if we were to assume the prosperity of a given community would have allowed bigger growth then we would have seen the Spanish population more than double every century, or even growth rates comparable to the cases you list above over a bigger timespan, but that doesn't seem the case as you had just a couple millions Europeans and Mestizos by 1800.

I'm also really curious that you think a complexer and resilient society can replace the fact that the Jesuit promoted a society that was so favourable for growth unlike most societies, I'm not sure the specifics of Guarani society mattered under the Jesuits, especially with the many changes the latter implemented or forced on the population.

I mean it's not like Mexico even grew that much(well it did more than double, but still it had immigration and some benefits from industrialization) post independence, relatively speaking, and I'm really curious of how one would have bigger growth rates right after the destabilization caused by diseases that would affect the region for centuries after the main shock, especially during times of droughts.

What doesn't convince me is this combination of the fact that the Mestizo or Europena populaiton didn't grow as much as you expect the native population to have grown(even with immigraiton for Europeans) or also why it took more than a century for Mexico post independence to grow back to its pre columbian levels with sizeable amount of migration and some benefits from industrialization(although minor as far as I know), using those other comparison I think the population would decline until 1600 and recover until 1800, this means Mexico would have 2.5 times the population it had IOTL composed of only natives, which means 5 time more natives than IOTL, to me this doesn't seem to be an implausible scenario and I find weird to think that the Spaniards somehow kept the Mexican native population stagnant until 1700-1750 all through their policies.

 

[Every Grass in Java]

Well I'm not sure why we would assume the growth would happen earlier without the Spanish

Because Newson's research on the Philippines shows that there appears to be a generally inverse relationship between the strength of the Spanish presence and the beginning of population recovery, one easier to perceive in the Philippines due to geography and the more tenuous nature of Spanish power. This was the case in Cebu compared to Luzon, for instance.

It might also be worth comparing the Philippines to eastern Indonesia. Both share similar climatic conditions, and both suffered from the introduction of disease in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to low population densities not allowing for Eurasian epidemic diseases becoming endemic. We actively know that disease was a massive killer in early seventeenth-century Indonesia; the Makassar Annals mention the need to "protect ourselves from starvation and raging epidemics" in 1636 (Cummings 2010 translation), and the corresponding VOC archives suggest mortality rates exceeding 40% (the city of Makassar, with a population of perhaps 150,000 in the 1630s, lost sixty thousand people in forty days). Yet it seems that in the case of eastern Indonesia, there was no long-term population decline at all. If anything, the population rose significantly. The growth only stopped when the area fell under Dutch hegemony and pre-existing economic networks were subverted or destroyed.

I'm using the Philippines as a shorthand because no sizable Mesoamerican or Andean state retained independence into the seventeenth century, so we can't compare, e.g., an independent Tarascan state with a subjugated Basin of Mexico. Nevertheless, the strongly negative impact of Spanish rule on native demographics seems clear.

the encomienda was abolished earlier than that and racial hierarchy laws didn't really change

Mesoamerican population recovery is generally credited to the major killers becoming endemic. New diseases being introduced could easily reverse recovery; the Yucatán Maya population entered a recovery phase as early as the 1590s, but this was all brought to naught when African slaves introduced yellow fever and half the Maya died. A disease being established as endemic is dependent on the size of the population; an interactive population of at least 100,000 is usually considered a prerequisite for smallpox endemicity (see Fenner, "Smallpox in Southeast Asia"). It is telling that there was no major epidemic in the Yucatán Peninsula for almost the entire eighteenth century following one last one in 1726 (probably measles, which requires a particularly large population for endemicity). There was also no major epidemic in the Basin of Mexico from 1741 to 1778.

Had New Spain's native population recovery been primarily about colonial policies or climate, we would expect places like New Mexico to also see native population recovery. Yet the Pueblo population was in free-fall throughout the eighteenth century, precisely because the seventeenth century had devastated their numbers beyond the point of recovery. Smallpox hit New Mexico virtually every decade, including a particularly devastating epidemic in the 1770s.

Now, there are two reasons why the population would recover faster under native than Spanish rule. First, the initial population loss would not have been nearly as large, meaning a larger pool of disease carriers and a faster "taming" of epidemic diseases.

Second, the Spanish presence was not beneficial for population recovery throughout the colonial period, encomienda or no. (Maya writers actually considered the repartimiento far more disruptive.)

In eighteenth-century Michoacán, village elites regularly sold communal land to criollos and other non-Indians, depriving the native population of major resource bases.

Nahua communities all over Central Mexico struggled with foreign landlords over land and water resources throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because their ancestors had sold much of their land to Spaniards at the height of the population decline, and this lack of access to land and resources meant that population recovery only led to the further impoverishment of the Nahua population. Spanish estates in formerly Nahua land were also often ranches or other forms of inefficient land use.

Things were similar in Oaxaca, with Spanish land use hastening soil erosion. Much of the native commercial economy in Oaxaca also collapsed to state-supported Spanish competition.

In Maya country (and also the Gulf Coast, but the Gulf Coast population collapsed so rapidly and horrifically that it's hard to tell), free-ranging cattle was absolutely devastating to native agriculture — we have Maya communities launching formal complaints against it, usually to no avail, even at the height of population collapse — and it was customary for Spanish ranchers to use the legal fuzziness of land rights in Maya country to appropriate huge tracts of native communal land.

Nancy M. Fariss says it well in Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival, on the famines that regularly devastated the eighteenth-century Yucatán (and these famines themselves testify to the consequences of colonial rule, since the Maya had not had many serious issues feeding three times the population prior to Spanish conquest):

We have no way of comparing the mortality caused by famines before and after the conquest. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Maya would have fared better without the sometimes well meaning but almost invariably disastrous intervention of the Spanish.​

is this based on archeology or censuses?

Censuses, so there's potential for undercount on both sides.

Taking the example of a non war free society, Europe required a century and a half to recover from a mere 33% population decline

What privileges Europe as an example and not, say, the Philippines, which recovered from a 41% population collapse in nine decades under (admittedly rather neglectful) colonial rule?

among the factors the natalist policies and apparent economic prosperity seem to be far more fitting to explain why the growth was so large.

On the other hand, the crowded structure of Jesuit missions was practically designed for the rapid spread of epidemics. Similar missions, like the Indian reductions in the Andes or the missions of California, might as well have been mass graves. The population of the missions was small enough that smallpox epidemics did not become endemic and hit regularly (1695, 1718-1719, the catastrophic 1733-1739, 1749, 1764-1765). The Guaraní, unlike independent Mesoamericans, also faced the burden of having to adopt to a drastically new mode of life. These issues are ones that would not be present in densely populated Mesoamerica.

It's particularly noteworthy that three smallpox epidemics, with an average mortality rate of 30%, were not enough to halt a 75% population increase from 1695 to 1733. It's unlikely that epidemics would hit nearly as frequently in a Mesoamerican context. There were no smallpox epidemics for almost forty years in the Basin of Mexico, remember.

Finally, the average Tzeltal Maya woman in the late eighteenth century, living under colonial rule, married earlier than the Jesuits' guidelines for boy's marriage (16.1 years) and had an average of 8.5 children! It's just that those children were more likely to die than in the Jesuit missions due to greater poverty. Is this "natalism" too?

(for more on Tzeltal fertility, see "Familia y fertilidad en Amatenango, Chiapas, 1785- 1816" by Herbert S. Klein)

It's not like the Spanish population grew during this time either, if we were to assume the prosperity of a given community would have allowed bigger growth then we would have seen the Spanish population more than double every century, or even growth rates comparable to the cases you list above over a bigger timespan

But they did! Morin's research shows that the growth rate of the Spanish population in Michoacán doubled that of the native population (which, by 1800, represented only 60% of the bishopric's inhabitants). The white population also grew twice faster than the Maya in the eighteenth-century Yucatán (see Patch, Maya and Spaniard). There were some 170,000 criollos in 1650; there were a million or more in 1800. The criollo population sextupled in five or six generations, during which, as we have seen, native populations struggled to even triple.

(To be fair, there was significant immigration from Spain in the eighteenth century, and some of these would have settled and contributed to the ballooning criollo population.)

Had the Yucatán Peninsula's Maya population grown as fast as its non-native population did, the Yucatán would have recovered 1492 population levels by 1794.