Drum (Teponaztli) 15th–16th century Aztec Positioned just as perfectly as part of an elegant wedding ensemble at the house of a noble family as it would have been in a grand military procession, a community-wide agricultural dance in Tenochtitlan (the ruins of which lie underneath what is now the center of modern-day Mexico City), or a rough-and-tumble sporting event at the Great Ballcourt, study of this horizontal drum reveals a succession of cultural layers, from its initial creation by a Mexica (Aztec) artist to its continued use in the colonial period (Bravo, 2018, p. 42; Castañeda and Men

Drum (Teponaztli) 15th–16th century Aztec Positioned just as perfectly as part of an elegant wedding ensemble at the house of a noble family as it would have been in a grand military procession, a community-wide agricultural dance in Tenochtitlan (the ruins of which lie underneath what is now the center of modern-day Mexico City), or a rough-and-tumble sporting event at the Great Ballcourt, study of this horizontal drum reveals a succession of cultural layers, from its initial creation by a Mexica (Aztec) artist to its continued use in the colonial period (Bravo, 2018, p. 42; Castañeda and Mendoza, 1933, p. 16; Kurath and Martí, 1964, p. 47, 60, 84). Known as a teponaztli, such drums were essential to religious, military, and especially royal ceremonies. We apply the term “Aztec,” a Western portmanteau meaning “people of Aztlan” (a mythical homeland), to a number of Nahuatl-speaking groups which were united under the rulership of the Mexica, a late-arriving but ultimately powerful group in the Valley of Mexico. This drum, likely made of extremely dense rosewood, is one of two primary types of percussion instruments in Mexica culture and consistent with those of the broader, Nahuatl-speaking world. The present teponaztli was hollowed out underneath so as to create room for the reverberations which produce its sound. Two keys or “tongues” on the top were hollowed out to different degrees in order to produce two distinct tones. Played by striking mallets on its long side, laid out horizontally on one’s lap or on a small stand (Both, 2010, p. 16), the instrument is distinct from the larger huehuetl drum, which is played by standing the object up on one of its small faces and drumming on the opposite face. Whereas the huehuetl is larger and more stationary in use, the teponaztli is quite mobile, albeit very cylindrical shape of this drum is fairly normative in the context of the larger corpus—some teponaztli were created in the shapes of ani

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