16 Calnek, , ‘The ethnographic content’, vol. 3, 84–6Google Scholar; Burkhart, , The slippery earth, 151Google Scholar; Clendinnen, , Aztecs, 160Google Scholar; Carrasco, P., ‘Family structure of sixteenth-century Tepoztlan’, in Manners, R. A. ed., Process and pattern in culture: essays in honor of Julian H. Steward (Chicago, 1964), 185–210Google Scholar. Cline (personal communication) thinks that almost the entire female population married by age 20. Calnek argues (‘The ethnographic content’, vol. 3, 91Google Scholar) that the Mendoza account of the birth and marriage rituals of commoners is to be preferred over those in the Florentine Codex, which refers to social elites. Premm’s discussion of marriage age, with its emphasis on education and temple duties, is clearly premised on elite experiences (see Premm, H. J., Dykerhoff, U. and Feldweg, H., ‘Reconstructing Central Mexico’s population,’ Mexican 15 (05 1993), 52–3Google Scholar. Among Yucatecan Maya women marriage is reported as occurring at around 20 years of age, falling to 12 under Spanish rule, but the documentary evidence for either figure is frail; see Farriss, N. M., Maya society under colonial rule. The collective enterprise of survival (Princeton, 1984), 173, 446Google Scholar. Gruzinski, in a passage of little import to his overall theme, citing del Paso, Francisco y Troncoso, ‘s Papeles de Nueva España (Madrid, 1905)Google Scholar, reports that according to the Relaciones geográficas village elders of Chicoloapan recalled [more than a half century after the conquest] that among ancient norms that had become lost and abandoned was that of late marriage, at 30 years for men and 25 for females (‘Le pueblo voisin de Chicoloapan ne se risque pas non plus sur cette voie, se contentant d’ajouter à la liste des normes perdues et abandonnees le mariage tardif d’antan [à trente ans pour les hommes et vingt-cinq ans pour les femmes]’), in Gruzinski, S., La colonisation de l’imaginaire: sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol XVIe–XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1988), 119Google Scholar. This testimony of perdition lost should not be accepted at face-value (which, of course, Gruzinski does not do – see pp. 132–7), but rather as ‘an idealization of the past’ (Burkhart, , The slippery earth, 151Google Scholar). Gibson, C. concurs (The Aztecs under Spanish rule: a history of the Indians of the valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964), 151, 504–5).Google Scholar