[From the AAA Anthropology Newsletter, 1996]
With her first book, Aztec City States (1984), Hodge broke new ground in Mesoamerican archaeology and state theory. She demonstrated considerable variability in political and administrative organization among the various polities that comprised the core of the Aztec empire. Even though there had been many previous contributions on the Aztec state by others, their primary focus had usually been the capital of Tenochtitlan, while Hodge's emphasis was on the middle and lower levels of the administrative hierarchy. To understand the dynamics of bureaucratic and administrative decision making for the Aztec state, Hodge argued that these lower-order units of the regional hierarchy must become a focus of study. Her work filled a major gap in our knowledge, and her discovery of the different structures of Aztec polities constitutes a major ethnohistoric contribution to Mesoamerican archaeology.
Hodge published a second book, entitled Economies and Polities in the Aztec Realm (1994, coedited with Michael E Smith). This volume featured her outstanding ability to integrate ethnohistory with archaeology. A third book, Aztec Imperial Strategies (coauthored with Frances Berdan, Richard Blanton, Elizabeth Boone, Michael Smith and Emily Umberger), appeared in 1996.
One of Hodge's ongoing projects (in collaboration with Leah Minc, Hector Neff and James Blackman) involved restudying ceramics collected on survey by Jeffrey Parsons and others. One goal was to determine the degree of fit, over time, between (1) centers of ceramic production, (2) distribution of specific types of pottery and (3) the boundaries of political units.
At the time of her death, Hodge was putting the finishing touches on still more manuscripts, including a book on her excavations at Chalco in the Basin of Mexico (a monograph to be published by U Pittsburgh). Her article "What Is a City-State? Archaeological Measures of Aztec City-States and City-State Systems" will appear in The Archaeology of City-States, edited by Deborah Nichols and Thomas Charlton and published by the Smithsonian Press.
Mary Hodge received her BA (1968) from Kalamazoo C, and MA (1978) and PhD (1983) from U Michigan. All of us feel her loss keenly, not only because she was such a close personal friend for so many years but also because we could see that some of her best works were "manuscripts in progress" that were left unfinished. Hodge's professional career was cut short with so much left to be done. (Joyce Marcus, with contributions by Michael E Smith)