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Ethnohistoric documents have been used to define the eastern limits of the Aztec empire in the Mesoamerican southern Gulf lowlands with contradictory results. Until the research presented here, complementary archaeological evidence for Aztec imperial interactions has largely evaded detection in this region. In this paper, I review the documentary data for Aztec expansion and interactions near its eastern frontier and present the most robust archaeological evidence discovered to date that supports this imperial presence in the southern Gulf lowlands. A new model for imperial-local interaction is also introduced.

In April 2015, the Society of Economic Anthropology held its annual conference, hosted at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, to discuss the theme "Technologies and the Transformation of Economies." The articles in this volume examine the multifaceted relationship between people and technology across different societies and at different periods in the history of social and economic transformations. This introduction to the volume (1) contextualizes the conference and frames the discussion of social transformations and technology within the larger debates on people and technology, (2) introduces the different articles from archaeology and ethnography that may potentially contribute to the scholarly debates on people and technology within anthropology and related social sciences, and (3) suggests new areas for future research on people and technology.In the realm of technology, co-extensive with the whole of history, there is no single onward movement, but many actions and reactions, many changes of gear. It is not a linear process. -Braudel (1992:334) From food foraging technologies to farming communities seeking cell phone-based climate forecasting, to booms and busts of Silicon Valley and the digital age, technology has been ever present in human economic life, past and present. From early iron forging to ceramic monetary systems, to recent currency creations such as Bitcoin, technology has transformed human economies. Technology, whether prehistoric inventions such as pottery and the wheel or twenty-first-century wireless communication, intersects with social and economic life and transforms human experience (Carey 1989; Ilahiane and Sherry 2012).In the ancient world, technological innovations were linked to sedentism, cereal domestication, and the intensification of agriculture to feed growing populations; they permitted the extension of trade routes; and they expedited the extraction and transformation of mineral resources. In many instances, technological transformations made the impossible possible, allowing for the effects of climate and geography to be mitigated for the purposes of food production, occupational specialization, and the transport of finely crafted exotics in support of class-based hierarchies. The Early Modern Atlantic World itself was the product of technological innovations spurred by economic competition between world empires. In the subsequent Industrial Age, the connections between technology and economic expansion intensified, contributing to a scale of socioeconomic inequality not previously seen.Without doubt, social-cultural life, whether in the present digital age or in past mechanical eras, is marked by a rapid speed of technical innovation, and societies eventually take advances for granted and create normative conditions for their use. Consequently, the key for anthropology is to investigate these nascent technologies before they become "rapidly mundane" (Horst and Miller 2012:29). This is important because it enables us to understand how technologies are changing human l...

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