The Noblewomen of Chalco

Resumen

Some years ago Kent Flannery speculated about the development of the "early Mesoamerican village", proposing that young noblewomen were the only commodity anywhere equal in value that could be traded for precious jade. I remember wondering if that might have been the very thing seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin (writing ca. 1600-1631) was referring to in his accounts about dynastic lineages and royal marriages in his home region of Amaquemecan (Amecameca) Chalco. After all, Chalco means "place of jade or precious green stone".