The altepetl, in Pre-Columbian and Spanish conquest-era Aztec society, was the local, ethnically based political entity. The word's a combination of the Nahuatl words ā-tl, meaning water, and tepē-tl, meaning mountain. Nahuatl scholars Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart have stated: A characteristic Nahua mode was to imagine the totality of the people of a region or of the world as a collection of altepetl units and to speak of them on those terms. They prefer the Nahuatl… (More on Altepetl)