The Quality of Tribute Cloth: The Place of Evidence in Archaeological Argument

Abstract

This paper continues the discussion of objectivity, subjectivity, and the place of evidence in archaeological argument begun by Wylie (1992a), Little (1994), and Fotiadis (1994). First, it describes my expectations concerning Indian women’s resistance to tribute cloth extraction in Aztec and colonial Mexico. Then, it explains how I tested my expectations against several bodies of archaeological data. Finally, it analyzes how I did and did not alter my initial beliefs in the face of a gap between the expected and the actual data. This study supports earlier conclusions by Trigger (1989) and Wylie (1992b) that data are somewhat independent of the archaeologists who collect them and that data have some impact on the larger edifice of assumptions that archaeologists bring to their research.