with which these natives honored their gods in times of infidelity. The Origin of the Gods. About the creation of the gods. The Soothsayers. About Indian judiciary astrology or omens and fortune-telling arts. The Omens. Deals with foretelling these natives made from birds, animals, and insects in order to foretell the future. Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy. About prayers to their gods, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and theology in the same context. The Sun, Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the Years. Deals with the sun, the moon, the stars, and the jubilee year. Kings and Lords. About kings and lords, and the way they held their elections and governed their reigns. The Merchants. About long-distance elite merchants, pochteca, who expanded trade, reconnoitered new areas to conquer, and agents-provocateurs. The People. About general history: it explains vices and virtues, spiritual as well as bodily, of all manner of persons. Earthly Things. About properties of animals, birds, fish, trees, herbs, flowers, metals, and stones, and about colors. The Conquest. About the conquest of New Spain from the Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco point of view. Ethnographic methodologies Sahagún was among the first people to develop an array of strategies for gathering and validating knowledge of indigenous New World cultures. Much later, the discipline of anthropology would later formalize these as ethnography. This is the scientific research strategy to document the beliefs, behavior, social roles and relationships, and worldview of another culture, and to explain these within the logic of that culture. Ethnography requires scholars to practice empathy with persons very different from them, and to try to suspend their own cultural beliefs in order to enter into, understand, and explain the worldview of those living in another culture. Sahagún systematically gathered knowledge from a range of diverse persons (now known as informants in anthropology), who were recognized as having expert knowledge of Aztec culture. He did so in the native language of Nahuatl, while comparing the answers from different sources of information. According to James Lockhart, Sahagún collected statements from indigenous people of "relatively advanced age and high status, having what was said written down in Nahuatl by the aids he had trained." Some passages appear to be the transcription of spontaneous narration of religious beliefs, society or nature. Other parts clearly reflect a consistent set of questions presented to different people designed to elicit specific information. Some sections of text report Sahagún's own narration of