The vagueness surrounding scholarly understanding of trade in Formative and Classic times is less pronounced for the Postclassic period ( A.D. 900-1521). In Postclassic contexts, archaeological materials are augmented by more definitive documentary evidence for the presence and nature of trade. Indeed, models for trade in earlier periods typically are derived from reconstructed late Postclassic (especially Aztec and Yucatecan Maya) economic conditions. Since the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are the best known, they can provide the basis for a more detailed understanding of Mesoamerican trade and markets.

Mesoamerican trade during the time of Aztec imperial domination ( A.D. 1430-1521) was carried on at different scales for a variety of purposes. At the most elite level, professional long-distance merchants (pochteca) from Valley of Mexico cities (the center of Aztec imperial domination) undertook long and dangerous journeys to obtain precious objects for their elite consumers. These merchants were organized in guild-like institutions concentrated in separate urban calpulli, or residential districts. They controlled education, rituals, and status rewards within their own groups; acted as judges in the great marketplace at Tlatelolco (sister-city of Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital); and served as emissaries and spies for the imperial ruler. As private entrepreneurs they could accumulate considerable wealth and high status within their guild; however, they were not numbered in the ranks of the nobility.

Pochteca traded their personal high-value, low-bulk goods in markets within the bounds of the empire as well as in extra-empire trading centers. Within the empire, the wealthiest merchants dealt in slaves and elaborate textiles, frequenting the large urban marketplaces. Among the private goods they traded to noble and commoner consumers in areas beyond direct imperial control were gold, copper, and obsidian objects; shells; rabbit fur; cochineal; alum; and herbs. In return they must have received a variety of exotic goods, but only cacao is recorded definitively. Yet it is also known that the Maya merchants, on the other side of the exchange, carried salt, cloth, slaves, cacao, and stone beads as well as beeswax and honey in their trading forays, and some of these items very likely were procured by Aztec pochteca and carried to their highland homelands. The wealthy Maya merchants reflect the somewhat more fragmented political organization of Yucatán in the early sixteenth century: they were frequently (or perhaps always) of noble status and were individual (rather than group) operatives owning their own factors, slave porters, and large trading canoes used in coastal transport.