This article from National Geographic, written by an archaeologist, explores the political history of this important ancient city, as well as the daily lives of its ordinary inhabitants.

THE TIMELESS VISION OF TEOTIHUACAN

By George E. Stuart

When Saburo Sugiyama began excavating along the southern edge of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at the Mexican ruin of Teotihuacan, he realized, as all archaeologists do at such times, that he was crossing the threshold of the unknown. But nothing could have prepared him that summer in 1983 for the macabre discovery at the bottom of a four-foot-deep trench. Seated, arms crossed in back, was the skeleton of a man. Around his neck was a broad collar made of more than 200 shell beads. Suspended from this had once been a tier of upper human jaws carved from now deteriorated wood and decorated with shell teeth.

Sugiyama and colleagues from Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) uncovered 17 other male skeletons in the grave. Their arms too were crossed, and they wore almost identical collars, although two had real human jaws with teeth intact. These men were probably soldiers, for on their lower backs were slate disks—once shiny with pyrite—a standard decoration on ancient Mexican military costumes. Weapons had been buried with them—the grave yielded 169 spearpoints.

“We have no idea how these men died,” Sugiyama says. “The bones are unscathed, but we know from radiocarbon dates on some of the organic material that the burial took place around ad 200.” Sugiyama believes they were sacrifice victims, because the bodies had been carefully positioned in the tomb with their arms tied behind their backs. “It strongly suggests that their killing was part of a ritual that marked the dedication of the structure.”

Teotihuacan was the first true urban center in the Western Hemisphere and the greatest metropolis on the landscape of the Americas before the Aztec Empire. It arose around the beginning of the Christian era, witnessed some seven centuries, then passed into legend. At the height of its prosperity, about ad 500, it is estimated to have held between 125,000 and 200,000 people—rivaling Shakespeare's London a millennium later. Teotihuacan thrived longer than imperial Rome, its contemporary, and in the more extreme setting of a high arid plateau slaked by a brief rainy season.

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It was the elaborate western facade of the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent that first drew me to the city nearly 30 years ago, when I was still in graduate school. I had taken my family to Teotihuacan as a side trip on our way overland from the United States to Yucatán, where, as a field assistant, I had helped map and excavate Dzibilchaltún and other Maya sites. The Feathered Serpent Pyramid lies on the east side of the huge plaza within the Ciudadela, or Citadel. Named by awed Spaniards in the 16th century, the Citadel was to Teotihuacan what the Forum was to Rome: its physical and spiritual center.

On that memorable afternoon the sun brought the pyramid's sculptured facade to life, and it seemed clear that the building was intended to catch—and hold—the attention of the viewer. Four stepped levels looming in front of me held great stone icons, alternating images of the Feathered Serpent—one of the most important supernatural beings in the ancient Mesoamerican pantheon—and enigmatic headdresses. Intricately carved and once brightly painted, they protruded from a backdrop of images of undulating serpent bodies and seashells. All these elements, arranged in geometric harmony, flanked a grand stairway with balustrades punctuated by fanged serpent heads.

Looking beyond the pyramid itself, I was amazed by the sheer sprawl and architectural grace of the Citadel and by the enormity of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon—Teotihuacan's most celebrated architectural treasures. And yet I knew that all this concentrated grandeur was but a tiny part of the immense city, abandoned and now in ruins, that lay around me....

Founded on what its builders must have regarded as an almost indescribably sacred spot about 30 miles northeast of what is now Mexico City, Teotihuacan once covered nearly eight square miles. Today much of the city is buried under five towns, one of Mexico's largest military bases, numerous farms, commercial centers, and a string of highways. The site also spreads into lonely backcountry, where dust devils stir the gray, talcum-like soil and foothill slopes with impenetrable clusters of prickly pears challenge graying archaeologists.

Teotihuacan was laid out according to a set of alignments that tied it intimately to the movements of the stars and to the mountains on the horizon. To all who knew it as a place of order and power, whose monumentality rivaled nature itself, the city must have seemed a true wonder of the world. The later Aztec knew Teotihuacan as the Place of the Gods. Today's Mexicans speak of the city simply as “the pyramids.”

When Sugiyama unearthed the mass grave at the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, he was working under the supervision of Rubén Cabrera Castro of INAH, as part of a team investigating the Citadel. The find spurred a collaborative investigation of the entire pyramid by scientists from Mexico, led by Cabrera, and the United States, under George Cowgill of Arizona State University in Tempe. Eventually the team tallied 133 skeletons in 21 separate graves along the edges, at the corners, and in the heart of the pyramid, and members suspect there are as many as 200. “We began to see a pattern in the placement of the burials,” Cabrera told me. “It saved us lots of tunneling.”

The corpses, females as well as males, were arranged in segregated groups of 4, 8, 9, 18, or 20—key numbers in the Mesoamerican calendar and cosmology. They had been placed in various positions: seated, on their backs, and on their sides. Those on the periphery faced outward, as if to guard the pyramid.

The archaeologists made one final discovery, which suggests that the Feathered Serpent Pyramid may have been the tomb of one of Teotihuacan's most powerful rulers. Tunneling deep into its core, Sugiyama encountered 20 male skeletons surrounded by a plethora of offerings, including objects of jade, shell, slate, wood, and flaked obsidian. It is the richest burial ever found at Teotihuacan.

Nearby was a tunnel, presumably dug by ancient looters, which skirted the mass grave. The tunnel led to a deep broad pit with a few skeletal remains and scattered fragments of its once rich contents. “It's exasperating,” says Cowgill. “The main tomb may have been there, but we will never know for sure.”

The mass sacrifice at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid—and this hint of a royal burial—are examples of recent gains in our understanding of Teotihuacan. Modern investigation of the site began in 1918 when Mexican archaeologist Manuel Gamio conducted the first systematic excavations around the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, which he also partly restored. Gamio's analysis earned him the title “father of Teotihuacan archaeology.” Archaeologists who followed concentrated initially on the pyramids, palaces, and plazas that give the city its public image.

Now we are beginning to learn about the lives of the Teotihuacanos—what kind of food they ate, how they used the rooms in their houses, and what kind of work they did. We have found out that the metropolis attracted immigrants from far afield and that it was the center of a vast trading network. We may even have the first tantalizing evidence of a writing system. (For me, the apparent lack of one has been Teotihuacan's greatest mystery.)

Yet despite these scholarly advances, more than 1,200 years after its fall Teotihuacan remains a paradox: We speak of it with awe, as we do the pyramids of Egypt, but we still know next to nothing about the origins of the Teotihuacanos, what language they spoke, how their society was organized, and what caused their decline.

Central to what we do know, however, is an atlas compiled in the 1960s by René Millon of the University of Rochester in collaboration with George Cowgill and Bruce Drewitt of the University of Toronto. The Teotihuacan Mapping Project, which Millon himself characterizes as “a staggering undertaking,” surely ranks among the greatest achievements in archaeological surveying.

From a combination of meticulous ground surveying and aerial photography, Millon and his team produced exquisitely detailed maps of the site that included, as reference points, the exact positions of modern buildings, roads, bridges, and other features. The surveyors and archaeologists plotted the ancient floors and walls on these base maps. Broken pots, figurines, and other artifacts at the surface helped them determine both the outermost limits of the city and the changing patterns of its growth.

The map of Teotihuacan reveals an urban grid as deliberate as Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D. C. The grid used two principal, almost perpendicular, alignments. The east-west axis led from a spot near the Pyramid of the Sun to a point of great significance on the western horizon. Astronomer-anthropologist Anthony Aveni of Colgate University explains that on the day that the sun passes directly overhead in the spring, about May 18, the revered Pleiades star cluster makes its first annual predawn appearance. It was at this point on the western horizon that the Pleiades set. A second theory notes that the sun also sets here on August 12—the anniversary of the beginning of the last great Mesoamerican calendar cycle—reckoned by many scholars to have begun on August 12, 3114 b.c. Whatever the astronomical motive for the axis, it was considered so important that the channel of the San Juan River, which crossed the center of the site, was rerouted to align with it.

The north-south axis is Teotihuacan's main avenue, which the Aztec named the Street of the Dead, possibly because they believed that the mounds along it held the tombs of ancient kings. This axis also produced a remarkable juxtaposition: It led the Street of the Dead directly toward the hulk of a hallowed mountain called Cerro Gordo. At the northern end of the street, in front of Cerro Gordo, the Teotihuacanos built the Pyramid of the Moon.

The planners of Teotihuacan thus achieved harmony among themselves, their landscape, the heavens, and the cadence of time itself. In the centuries to follow, the layout of the growing city never deviated from this grand and sacred scheme.

Late on a raw October day I made my pilgrimage to the 140-foot-high summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, as I do every time I visit Teotihuacan. In prehistory, only three structures in the Americas were larger: its near neighbor, the Pyramid of the Sun; a massive mound completed 500 years later by the inhabitants of Cholula, some 60 miles to the southeast; and the great adobe mound of the Huaca del Sol, built by the Moche people on the north coast of Peru....

Standing on the summit, now an irregular dome of packed rubble, I imagined myself in the doorway of a temple. With my back to the gently curving heights of Cerro Gordo and with my line of sight coinciding with the center line of the Street of the Dead, I contemplated the scene. The street—no less than 50 yards wide—and the platforms, pyramids, and staircases that line it with unwavering geometric regularity all converge toward the volcanic ranges of the far southern horizon. The whole is a masterpiece of architectural and natural harmony.

From my viewing point the combination of light and shadow played to full advantage on the stark platforms and pyramids. The scene was unified by the talud y tablero, the Spanish term for the distinctive building style of generations of master architects at Teotihuacan. Platforms and pyramids had slanted walls (taludes), which were capped with overhanging vertical stone panels (tableros).

To my left loomed the Pyramid of the Sun, the largest known ancient structure in the Americas, after the Cholula mound. It rises 212 feet, and its base—more than 700 feet to a side—nearly matches that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. But such impressive statistics seem beside the point when you see the Pyramid of the Sun. My eyes were drawn to a ribbon of color in the radiant light—the clothes of a multitude of visitors toiling up the more than 240 steps from the Street of the Dead.

The Pyramid of the Sun is slightly less of a monument than it originally was. In a hasty restoration attempt to celebrate the 1910 centennial of Mexico's Independence Day, most of its original facing stones were stripped away.

Walking around the Pyramid of the Sun to its east side, I found an excavation in progress. Leading it was my old friend Eduardo Matos Moctezuma of INAH, the archaeologist who in the 1970s uncovered the foundations of the Great Temple of the Aztec and other remains of their capital beneath Mexico City. Since 1991 Matos has had the daunting task of managing all archaeological activities within the heart of Teotihuacan—protected as a national park and separated by a road and fence from the bulk of the site, which lies on privately owned lands.

“We're finding the original plaza level here—a sunken space surrounding three sides of the base of the pyramid,” he told me. “Its location and privacy suggest that it may have been one of the most sacred spots in the city, although we can't yet say what happened here. We've got the stucco floor, though, and it's easy to see precisely how it curves up onto the original surface of the pyramid itself. This will help immensely in rectifying the old errors in restoration—at least on paper.”

Hidden below the Pyramid of the Sun lies a mysterious cave. It extends 330 feet from its mouth near the base of the pyramid stairway to a point near the center of the pyramid. The Teotihuacanos must have used the cave for something, because its walls were reshaped and in some places reroofed.

Its entrance may have been the initial sighting point for the east-west alignment that was so crucial in the city plan. The cave, therefore, may have been the holiest of holies—the very place where Teotihuacanos believed the world was born. Some archaeologists speculate, based on contemporary as well as ancient indigenous religious practices in Mesoamerica, that the cave was an oracle or meeting place for secret cults.

Linda Manzanilla, an archaeologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), has a theory about the city's numerous other caves. “There are a lot more than we ever thought,” she said, as we embarked on a tour of a labyrinth of underground passageways east of the Pyramid of the Sun. “I think these chambers and tunnels are the source of virtually all the volcanic stone used to build Teotihuacan.”...

“Based on the character of their walls, I developed the idea that these caves are all artificial, dug to get stone for the buildings,” Manzanilla said. After ten years of work, she has determined that the volume of stone taken from the caves is equivalent to the volume of stone used to build the city's residential compounds. (The pyramids in the ceremonial center are largely volcanic rubble with stone veneers.) Another Teotihuacan mystery may have been solved.

Remnants of large ceramic vessels in the caves point to their use as storage areas. They were also burial sites. In a lower corner of the main chamber, a student was brushing dirt, slowly exposing the skeleton of one of the city's later Toltec occupants. Manzanilla expects to find Teotihuacano burials as well. People may have believed that the caves provided a direct link to the underworld, where, according to Mesoamerican belief, life not only ended but also began a resurrection journey, symbolized by the daily passage of the sun.

To appreciate Teotihuacan as a living city, one must look beyond the monuments along the Street of the Dead to the outlying districts. There René Millon's mapping team found surface traces of the walls of some 2,000 groups of dwellings—the places where Teotihuacanos lived, worked, loved, worshiped, and died.

Teotihuacan archaeologists refer to these as apartment compounds. Each compound probably housed a single kin group, related families and their closest relatives. Within a compound's exterior wall were a varying number of apartments, each consisting of clusters of rooms with different functions. Seen from the gargantuan downtown structures, the flat rooftops of the apartment compounds would have stretched, like tiles on a floor, to all horizons. Beyond lay cornfields and a lattice of irrigation ditches.

Compounds varied in size, with the largest covering more than 35,000 square feet—enough room for a hundred or more people. At roughly 7,000 square feet, the smallest compounds may have held 20 people or so. Each compound occupied a rectangular block and was separated from its neighbors by straight streets—12 feet wide on average—and narrow alleyways, all paved with stucco. To the street the apartments presented windowless walls of stuccoed stone one story high and about two feet thick, relieved by a single doorway.

Atetelco is a medium-size compound, grandly called a palace, about a half-mile walk west of the Street of the Dead. As always, I was pleased to find that an old acquaintance, Raul Roldán Cortéz, a curator at Teotihuacan for 35 years whom I had not seen in more than a decade, was still there, watching over the exposed ruins and explaining them to visitors. Distinguished in his crisp official khakis, he looked grayer than before—but no less genial.

“You know,” he said, as we passed through what had once been a maze of rooms and hallways, “I've been here so long that I often feel this is my real home.”

Atetelco would have made a fine home for Raul or anyone else around a.d. 400, when it was built for members of the upper middle class. Designed for maximum privacy, most of the chambers are fairly small, measuring at most 10 by 15 feet, with doorways that may have been covered by cloth curtains. Many of the tall interior walls were painted, at least along their base and around the doorway. Judging from material excavated from collapsed rooms, the flat roofs of the apartment compounds were made of thin poles laid across beams and coated with stucco.

Most rooms enclose sunken courtyards or patios open to the sky. Family ceremonies, religious rituals, and other shared activities no doubt took place in these spaces, which had the added benefit of catching sunlight and precious rainfall. Throughout the compound, carefully graded stucco floors funneled water to hidden reservoirs. An intricate drainage system below the floor led excess water to the street.

Raul and I stopped in one of Atetelco's two main courtyards to admire the unusually elaborate altar at its center—a miniature pyramid carved from gray volcanic stone, featuring a tiny staircase and surmounted by a small temple.

The courtyard is bounded by three large squarish rooms on platforms with front stairways and wide columned porticoes. Each room has been restored to its original height of about 20 feet. Painted on the walls in various shades of red are themes of war and sacrifice, suggesting to some archaeologists that Atetelco was the headquarters for a local military order. A superbly rendered procession of coyotes with feather headdresses fills one wall. On another, soldiers carry knives with human hearts impaled on them.

Such paintings, rarely preserved so well as they are at Teotihuacan, appear sometimes in even the smallest compounds and are for me the most revealing of Teotihuacan's surviving treasures. This was truly a painted city, many of its walls adorned with images of gods, people, and animals; representations of mountains, trees, flowers, and water; depictions of the insignia of war; motifs of blood and sacrifice; and pictures of divine hands and ornate headdresses.

Images of the Goddess and the male Storm God are so common in the city that these supernatural figures were probably the supreme beings of the official religion. In her studies of art and iconography over the past 20 years, Esther Pasztory of Columbia University has clarified the nature of the gods of Teotihuacan. The many guises of the Goddess—sometimes she seems beneficent, sometimes fierce—show her intimate relation to nature in the form of mountains, which were sacred, and as the capricious provider of water. Her male counterpart, the fanged, goggle-eyed Storm God, also represents water, but the lightning bolt he wields symbolizes war as well. So the murals speak not only of the sacred and secular life of Teotihuacan but also of the inextricable relationship between them.

Not far from Atetelco, also on the west side of the city, is a neighborhood called La Ventilla, which encompasses several compounds of varying size and character. This neighborhood is of great interest to Rubén Cabrera. “The most important thing about La Ventilla,” Cabrera told me, “is the opportunity to study social relationships within the city. The rooms and compounds here had functions that must have been as different as the people who lived in them and, after all, that is what Teotihuacan was all about.”

A compound on one block is finely built, with precise masonry, painted patios, and numerous rooms, some designed for high ceremonial activity. A place across the street, by contrast, is shabby—a virtual slum. It yielded undistinguished ceramics and a grave with a disproportionate number of infants. Presumably malnutrition or disease had afflicted the people who lived there.

Among Cabrera's other finds at La Ventilla is a 35-foot-deep stone-lined well—uncommon in excavations so far—that supplied one compound. His team also excavated numerous ceramics, sculptures, and a wealth of murals—grist for iconographers and art historians.

The stucco on the stairways and floors in the patio of one apartment has retained its gleaming white finish and brilliant red borders. As the archaeologists cleaned away the dust, they exposed what looked like large hieroglyphs, some standing alone and others arranged in groups: human faces, animal heads, circles, and other symbols.

For me, this is one of the most important discoveries to come to light in many years. Previously, Teotihuacan had yielded only isolated symbols of uncertain meaning. Bar-and-dot numbers, the customary calendrical notation in ancient Mesoamerica, have been found here only rarely, such as on two stucco-covered conch shells, and no system of hieroglyphic writing such as was used by the Maya has surfaced. Could these few intriguing symbols be evidence at last of Teotihuacano writing? Unfortunately the sample is far too small to make interpretation possible—especially since we have no clear idea what language the Teotihuacanos spoke.

At Oztoyahualco, a modest barrio near the northwestern edge of the city, Linda Manzanilla has accomplished what seems a miracle of interpretation: In the almost total absence of artifacts and other remains, she has revealed facets of the daily lives of the people there by analyzing the chemical composition of apartment floors.

“We knew the stucco floors were swept clean by the original inhabitants,” Manzanilla told me, “so we planned a strategy that took into consideration chemical traces of human activity. For example, areas high in phosphates show where organic refuse was abundant—areas where food was consumed.” Because lime was used to prepare tortillas—as much a dietary staple then as now—Manzanilla concluded that high concentrations of carbonate pointed to either a kitchen or a place where stucco had been processed.

With the knowledge that alkalinity levels are high where fires burn and that high iron concentrations indicate likely butchering areas, she plotted her findings on the floor plan. In the end she had enough information to pinpoint the places where a ceramic cooking stove stood, where food was stored, and where meals were eaten.

Teotihuacanos apparently enjoyed a varied diet of plants and meat. Aside from the expected corn, beans, squash, and chili peppers, there were traces of cactuses, hawthorns, and cherries. Among the bones in refuse piles were those of rabbits, deer, dogs, and turkeys, along with ducks and fish.

The picture emerges of three families living in three separate apartments within this Oztoyahualco compound—no more than about 30 people in all. “Each apartment,” Manzanilla explained, “included rooms for eating, sleeping, and storage, patios for cult activity, and funerary areas.” She also found stone-smoothing tools that may have been used by plaster polishers to finish temples in the neighborhood.

The specialists at Oztoyahualco had counterparts throughout the city. At Tetitla, a compound near Atetelco, excavation has found numerous small flaked stone scrapers of a kind used to extract pulp from the fibrous leaves of the agave plant: Tetitla may have been devoted to the production of pulque, an alcoholic drink taken at ritual ceremonies. In other compounds skilled Teotihuacanos wove cloth, molded and painted pottery vessels, carved stone masks and figurines, and worked obsidian into fine blades.

The remains of the obsidian mines that contributed to the city's economic success lie 35 miles north of Teotihuacan at Cerro de las Navajas—Mountain of the Knives. Obsidian, a fragile natural glass that can be made into a blade sharper than a surgeon's steel scalpel, was prized throughout Mesoamerica for household knives, scrapers, and saws. Hunters venturing into the countryside around Teotihuacan carried obsidian spears and skinning tools; soldiers in Teotihuacan's prestigious military companies used it to tip their lances; artisans chipped the green stone into a dazzling variety of shapes for use in religious ceremonies or as luxury items for elite consumers; priests used obsidian knives in human sacrifice.

I can envision porters on the trails from Cerro de las Navajas, bent beneath the weight of obsidian-bearing rocks as they trudged toward the city. The raw obsidian was sold, possibly in a central market, to craft specialists from the different compounds. From the volume of obsidian debris found, it seems that blades and tools were made in dozens of apartment compounds—for sale locally and through much of central Mexico and for export as gifts and symbols of Teotihuacan to the elite of more distant points in Mesoamerica.

Teotihuacan grew so prosperous during its golden period from about a.d. 200 to 500 that it became a magnet for foreigners. The newcomers tended to stay together, much as immigrants to the great cities of North America do today.

Evelyn Rattray, a UNAM archaeologist who excavated a neighborhood east of the city center, found that house styles and some of the pottery closely resembled those at sites in the Veracruz area, 100 miles to the east, and in the Maya region, 300 miles beyond that. When René Millon mapped Teotihuacan in the 1960s, he named this enclave Merchants' Barrio, because the array of ceramics suggested its occupants were traders. Rattray's work confirms the presence of immigrants.

“We couldn't figure it out at first,” she recalled when we talked in her university laboratory in Mexico City. “I thought surely I was digging somewhere else.” Some of the pottery in the barrio was obviously Maya, she said, handing me a wide-mouthed jar decorated with the orange, brown, and cream anthropomorphic designs characteristic of Maya ceramic art. “Even the houses were different—circular with thatched roofs,” Rattray said. The immigrants had persisted in using the architectural style of their lowland homeland.

Michael Spence of the University of Western Ontario has excavated another such enclave that Millon found, the Oaxaca Barrio, near the western edge of the city. It was home to Zapotec families from the area of the famed site of Monte Albán, some 250 miles south of Teotihuacan. These people, probably also traders, imported their own funerary customs. Spence's team found walk-in tombs of carved stone identical to those that lie beneath Monte Albán and other Zapotec sites.

As people converged on Teotihuacan, ideas and customs as well as goods flowed out, bringing what archaeologists call “Teotihuacan influence” to the farthest reaches of Mesoamerica. We are still uncertain how this happened, but most likely it was through trade or military conquest or a combination of both.

The unmistakable impact of Teotihuacan can be seen in the ceramics, iconography, and architecture at many Maya sites in the early centuries a.d. And at Oaxacan as well as at Maya sites, hieroglyphs refer to Teotihuacan in contexts suggesting great reverence for it as the Place of the Reeds: In the traditional histories of Mesoamerica, this was the legendary place of origin of civilization itself.

Teotihuacan-style rectangular shields adorned with the Storm God and other insignia of the city appear prominently in the military garb of the fourth- and fifth-century rulers of the Maya sites of Tikal and Copán. In one burial at Copán, a noble actually wears the cutout shell goggles that allowed him the honor of identifying with the Storm God. At Tikal, 600 miles from Teotihuacan and deep in the rain forest of northern Guatemala, one building is so reminiscent of Teotihuacan that archaeologists half-jokingly call it the Teotihuacan Embassy.

Inexplicably, sometime after a.d. 500, half a millennium after its first flowering as a sacred and secular power, Teotihuacan went into a terminal decline. By a.d. 750 the Place of the Gods had collapsed. The sheer volume of people finally may have exceeded the ability of the surrounding land to sustain them. Lack of sanitation may have been involved, with fatal diseases spreading as sewage and waste accumulated. Other possibilities are that a widening gap between the elite and Teotihuacanos of low status sparked a revolt or that political infighting crippled the bureaucracy.

Archaeologists working in the vicinity of the Street of the Dead have come across many piles of burned debris, evidence that a systematic burning of public buildings—possibly the culmination of an organized rebellion—brought Teotihuacan to its end. If so, there would be an irony in that event—a kind of ritual obliteration of the ideals embodied in the ceremony of sacrifice and renewal that had marked the dedication of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid long before.

The cataclysmic fall of Teotihuacan must have sent shock waves throughout Mesoamerica, disrupting trade networks and affecting people in settlements from Oaxaca to the frontiers of the Maya realm. For students of Mesoamerican prehistory, the end of Teotihuacan marks the beginning of the end of the Classic period, which the city had helped define.

As I left the silent ruins, I reflected on how my reaction to Teotihuacan has changed. At the time of my first visit in 1968, the scene from the Pyramid of the Moon was a sublime vista of monumental architecture in a monumental landscape. But there was no connection with human beings. Today, thanks to the continuing work of archaeologists and their collaborators in many sciences, we have begun to populate that vista with the householders, nobles, farmers, merchants, priests, and others who took part in this grand urban experiment.

Source: National Geographic, December 1995.

Appears in

Teotihuacán; Toltec; Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture; Temple (building); Pyramids (The Americas); Archaeology; Aztec Empire