| Upon returning from any expedition, pochteca always enter the city under the cloak of darkness. |
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| Foreign goods were brought into the Aztec homeland by great caravans of professional merchants called pochteca, who frequently undertook journeys exceeding a year in length. |
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| Quite often the pochteca would seize lands of hostile peoples through which they passed, or they would provoke incidents that led to the intervention of the regular Aztec army. |
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| Thus, the Teotihuacán involvement with Tikal and the Central Subregion may have taken, as at Kaminaljuyú, the form of pochteca trading colonies that exerted some control over the lowland Maya. |
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| As stated before, pochteca could serve as judges, often exercising judicial oversight of their own members. |
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| Finally, the pochteca were merchants who traveled all of Mesoamerica trading. |
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| The power, political and economic, of the pochteca was strongly tied to the political and military power of the Aztec nobility and state. |
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