Quiz 2 · Primary and Secondary Sources — Ancient America to the Singularity

Who made this?

1. Who made it?: The stone in the photograph was carved by Mexica sculptors in Tenochtitlan. The Mexica are the people most books call the Aztecs. The sculptors’ names are not recorded.
2. When, and where?: Probably between 1502 and 1520, in the reign of Moctezuma II, in Tenochtitlan, the city that lies under Mexico City now. It is basalt, about 12 feet across, about 3 feet thick, and about 54,000 pounds.
3. Why, and for whom?: People called it a calendar for two hundred years, and the signs of the twenty days are carved on it, but it was not a calendar. Scholars now read it as a cuauhxicalli, an “eagle vessel,” a stone on which offerings were laid for the sun. It was carved to lie flat. The museum stands it upright so that visitors can see its face.
4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?: It never left its city. After the Spanish conquest it was buried in what became the main square. On December 17, 1790, workers paving the square found it. It was set into a tower of the cathedral in 1791 and stayed there, in the open, for nearly a century. In 1885 it was moved into the National Museum on Moneda Street, and in 1964 to the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park, where it is now.
5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?: The sculptors’, and the priests who used the stone. The nearest thing we have to a Mexica voice is the Florentine Codex, an account of Mexica life and of the conquest written in Nahuatl by Nahua scholars between the 1550s and the 1570s, working with the friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Its twelfth book tells the conquest from inside the city. The English translations are under copyright, so this page can point you to it but cannot print it.

For your notebook: found under a city square, the stone has stayed in its own city. The quipu on the Map page stayed in its own country, in a museum in Lima, but no one knows the valley it came from. Are those the same kind of staying?

Sources: Getty Research Institute, “The Aztec Calendar Stone”; Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City; Mexicolore, “The Aztec Calendar Stone or Sun Stone.”

First, the idea

The test will hand you a letter, a speech, a photograph, a chart, a page from a textbook, and ask you to reason from it. Before you reason, you need to know what kind of thing you are holding. The first sorting is into two piles.

A primary source was made by someone who was there or took part: a letter, a diary, a speech, a photograph, a law, an object, a count made at the time. A secondary source was made later, by someone who studied primary sources and wrote about them: a textbook, an encyclopedia article, a documentary, a museum label.

Hands between. Think of how many pairs of hands stand between you and the event. A primary source has the fewest: the person who was there made it. A secondary source has more: someone read the first-hand accounts and wrote about them, and you are reading that. Each pair of hands can add something, drop something, or bend something. Fewer hands does not mean truer. A soldier who was there can lie, or forget, or see only his side. It means closer. Once you know how close a source is, you ask what its maker wanted.

So the test’s questions about sources come down to a few that you can ask of anything: Who made it? When, and is that the same as when the events happened? Why, and for whom? And what could this person see, and what could they not see? The card at the top of every page in this series asks the same questions, and adds one more: whose voice is missing.

Two traps. The first is primary for what? A photograph of Machu Picchu taken in 1912 is a primary source for what the site looked like in 1912. It is not a primary source for the Inca who built it four and a half centuries earlier. The second is later is not secondary. A soldier who writes his memories forty years afterward is still a witness; the gap is a reason to check his details, not a reason to move him to the other pile.

Worked example — thinking out loud

In about 1615 a man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala finished a letter to the king of Spain. It ran to nearly 1,200 pages and nearly 400 drawings, and it described Peru before and after the Spanish conquest of 1532. Guaman Poma was Quechua, from a noble family, born some years after the conquest.

The question: Is his book a primary source for the Inca?

My first pull is to say yes: he was Quechua, he wrote about the Inca, and he drew them. But the first question is not “was he one of them”; it is “was he there.” He was not. The Inca state ended before he was born. What he knew of it, he had from elders and from what survived around him. For the Inca, his book is a very early secondary source, close, careful, and irreplaceable, but with hands between.

Now turn the question around. For Peru under Spanish rule around 1600, the abuses he saw, the courts he argued in, the roads he walked, he was there. For that, the same book is a primary source, and a rare one, because it is written by a Native man in his own voice.

So the honest answer has two parts, and so will some answers on the test: primary for one thing, secondary for another. The check that saved me was the first question on the card.

Part A · The skill by itself

1. Which of these is a primary source for life in Tenochtitlan in 1519?

a museum label written in 2019 about the Sun Stone a letter Hernán Cortés wrote to the king of Spain in 1520, describing the city a chapter about the Mexica in a 2023 history textbook a documentary film about the conquest made in 2005

2. Hiram Bingham photographed Machu Picchu in 1912. For which question is his photograph a primary source?

What did the Inca who built the site use it for? What did the site look like in 1912? How many people lived there in 1450? What did the Inca call the place?

3. Bernal Díaz marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519 and wrote his account in the 1560s, when he was about seventy. What does that gap most call for?

setting the account aside, because memory fails reading it as a first-hand account, and checking its details against other sources treating it as a secondary source, because it was written so much later trusting it more, because he had years to think it over

Part B · The skill in the wild

Two passages about one city. Read both before you look at the questions, and read the lines under each passage that say who wrote it and when.

Passage 1

We arrived at a broad Causeway, and continued our march towards Iztapalapa, and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Díaz was a soldier in Cortés’s army. He entered the city on November 8, 1519, wrote this account in the 1560s, and died in 1584; the book was first printed in 1632. English translation by Alfred Maudslay, 1908 (public domain). The word in brackets is an editor’s explanation: a cue was a temple pyramid.

Passage 2

Tenochtitlan was founded by the Mexica on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325, according to their own histories. By 1519 it was one of the largest cities in the world. Estimates of its population differ widely; a common figure is about 200,000, larger than any city in Spain at the time. Three causeways joined the island to the shore, an aqueduct carried fresh water from the springs at Chapultepec, and farmers grew food on chinampas, raised fields built in the shallow lake. The Spaniards who entered the city on November 8, 1519, wrote of what they saw in letters and, years later, in memoirs. The Nahua people who lived there told their side too: their account of the conquest, written in Nahuatl in the 1550s and after, fills the twelfth book of the Florentine Codex.

Written for this quiz in 2026 from: OpenStax, World History, Volume 1, chapter 8; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Tenochtitlán”; the Getty Research Institute on the Florentine Codex.

4. Which passage is a primary source for the Spaniards’ arrival at Tenochtitlan, and why?

Passage 1, because Díaz was there Passage 2, because it gives more facts Passage 1, because it was printed in 1632 Both, because both describe November 8, 1519

5. According to his own words, what could Díaz see from the causeway?

how many people lived in the city towers, temples, and buildings rising from the water how the chinampas were farmed the year the city was founded

6. Díaz says the city was “like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis.” Amadis of Gaul was a best-selling tale of knights in Spain in Díaz’s youth. What does this detail tell a reader about the source?

Díaz believed the city had been built by magic. Díaz reached for a popular Spanish story to describe something he had no words for. The city had been built by Spaniards. The translator made a mistake.

7. Passage 2 says the Nahua account of the conquest fills a book of the Florentine Codex. Why does a reader of Passage 1 need that fact?

because Díaz’s account is false because a first-hand account from one side is not the whole event; the people in the city saw the same day from the other side because the Codex was written before Díaz wrote because the Codex is a secondary source

8. Complete the sentence so that it matches the source lines under the passages.

Díaz wrote his account [in 1519 / in the 1560s / in 1632]. It is still a [primary / secondary] source, because he took part in what it describes.

The key — and why the tempting answers tempt

1. B. Cortés was there, and he wrote in 1520, within a year of the events. A, C, and D were all made centuries later by people who studied sources; they are secondary, however good. Note what B is not: it is not neutral. Cortés wrote to impress a king. Primary means close, not fair.

2. B. The camera saw 1912: the stones, the plants growing over them, the light that day. A, C, and D ask about the 1400s, and the photograph cannot see that far back. This is the “primary for what?” trap: the same object is primary for one question and not for another.

3. B. He was there; that does not change with time. The gap is a reason to check, and historians do check him against Cortés’s letters and the Nahua accounts. C is the twist that tempts most: “later” sounds like “secondary,” but secondary means made from other sources, not made afterward. A throws away a witness. D turns a weakness into a strength without evidence.

4. A. The source line says it: soldier, entered the city that day. C gives the right passage for the wrong reason; the printing date has nothing to do with it. B confuses more facts with closer hands; Passage 2 is a secondary source no matter how much it knows. D ignores the question’s “why.”

5. B. His own words: towers, cues, buildings rising from the water, all of masonry. A, C, and D are things Passage 2 tells you. A witness reports what he saw; he could not count the city from a causeway, and he did not know its founding date. Keep each passage’s knowledge in its own pile.

6. B. He says so himself: things “never heard of or seen before,” and so he reaches for the nearest picture his readers would know. A takes a comparison as a belief. C is a flat contradiction of both passages. D blames the translator for the writer’s own image; the comparison is in the Spanish.

7. B. This is the card’s fifth question. Díaz saw the causeway from the outside coming in. The Nahua account is the view from the city. Neither is the whole event alone. A goes too far; needing another side is not the same as calling the first side false. C is wrong on the dates and would not matter if it were right. D is wrong: the Codex was written by people of the city within living memory, from witnesses; for the conquest it is a primary source with hands between, the way Díaz is.

8. in the 1560s; primary. The source line gives the decade. Taking part is what makes it primary. “In 1519” is the date of the events, not of the writing. “In 1632” is the printing. “Secondary” is the “later means secondary” trap from item 3, back for a second try.

Improve this quiz

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Which wrong answer almost got you — and why?
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