Teotihuacan

A city with no name of its own

formationDrafted from Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)

Sometime in the first or second century before the common era, the scattered population of the Basin of Mexico began concentrating in a single place in its semi-arid northeastern reaches. The move was remarkably fast: within a couple of centuries the settlement covered some twenty square kilometres and held sixty to eighty thousand people, a scale no earlier Mesoamerican community had approached. Modern archaeology calls the city Teotihuacan - a name given to it centuries later by the Aztecs, who found its ruins already ancient and its builders' own name for it already lost.

Pyramids built to need no inscription

What the newly concentrated population built first were monuments on a scale meant to be self-explanatory. The Pyramid of the Sun, begun early in the city's growth, rivals in footprint the largest pyramids of Egypt. Within a few generations it was joined by the Pyramid of the Moon and, further south, a walled sixteen-hectare precinct called the Ciudadela enclosing a third great structure honouring the Feathered Serpent. All of it was laid out along a single five-kilometre avenue, later named the Avenue of the Dead, under one coordinated city plan imposed across nearly the whole settlement - a degree of central control matched by few other Mesoamerican cities before or after it.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Arian Zwegers · CC BY 2.0

Rulers who left buildings instead of names

No inscription found at Teotihuacan names a king, records a conquest, or commemorates a dynasty the way contemporary rulers elsewhere in Mesoamerica did on carved stelae. What survives instead is architecture: structures on a scale that made verbal or pictorial boasting unnecessary, built by rulers modern archaeologists infer were few in number, individually powerful, and confident enough in their own authority that they needed no monument to say so directly. Possible royal tombs are suspected beneath both the Sun and Moon pyramids, though looting in antiquity has left their contents, and the identities of whoever built them, unrecoverable.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Arian Zwegers · CC BY 2.0

Two hundred lives for a pyramid

formationDrafted from Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)

Around 200 CE, the dedication of the temple honouring the Feathered Serpent within the Ciudadela precinct was marked with a mass killing. Excavations in the late 1980s uncovered roughly two hundred sacrificial victims buried as part of the pyramid's own construction, many dressed in military costume and equipped with weapons, arranged beneath and around the structure in patterns archaeologists connect to the Mesoamerican calendar and creation symbolism rather than to any random disposal of bodies. Two large looted pits beneath the pyramid and at the foot of its stairway may once have held the remains of Teotihuacan's own rulers, accompanied in death by these followers.

National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City · Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Rosemania · CC BY 2.0

A war god as real as the warriors who served him

The scale of the sacrifice fits a broader pattern archaeology has uncovered across the city: war was not merely symbolic decoration at Teotihuacan but a genuine organizing force in its own political life. Clay figurines found throughout the city, once puzzling for their contorted poses, are now understood to depict warriors poised to throw a spear, shield in hand. Armies drawn from common citizens as well as the elite, fighting in disciplined formation with dart-throwing weapons, most plausibly explain how a city without any obvious natural fortress commanded the loyalty, or the fear, of neighbouring settlements it would otherwise have had every reason to resist.

National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City · Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Wolfgang Sauber · CC BY-SA 3.0

A reputation that outlasted the reality

Teotihuacan's own military reputation eventually travelled further than its armies plausibly ever marched. Distant Maya cities as far away as Tikal and Kaminaljuyú adopted Teotihuacan-derived war symbolism and weaponry into their own art and ritual, evidence less of direct conquest

• which the distances involved make unlikely - than of a prestige so potent that foreign elites found it worth borrowing on its own terms, regardless of whether Teotihuacan's own soldiers had ever set foot in their territory.

A ruined pyramid left standing

peakDrafted from Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)

The Feathered Serpent Pyramid did not stand unaltered for long. Excavation of its front face found that the pyramid and the temple atop it had been deliberately burned in an intense fire, its modelled clay walls smashed and used as fill for a stepped platform later built to cover the ruin. What is striking is what the builders chose not to do: rather than burying the damaged structure under a grander replacement, in the way earlier Teotihuacan monuments had regularly been enlarged and rebuilt, they left the burned ruin exposed behind the new platform - a visible scar rather than a concealed one.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Peachseltzer · CC BY-SA 4.0

A warning left standing on purpose

Archaeologists read the decision to leave the damage visible as deliberate: a reminder, aimed at any future ruler tempted to repeat the scale of the pyramid's own dedication sacrifice, of what excess had already cost one regime. Whether the reaction came quickly, from elites appalled at the killing of their own high-status kin, or only after a succession of autocratic rulers had continued the same pattern for a century or more before a weaker one allowed revolt to succeed, the archaeological sequence cannot yet say with confidence.

A city that may have chosen to be ruled differently

What followed, across the centuries from roughly 250 to 600 or 700 CE, was a city that kept building on a large scale but stopped building new pyramids to individual glory. Effort shifted instead to architecturally substantial apartment compounds that eventually housed nearly the whole population, from the lowest social rank to the highest, within standardized residential units rather than grand individual monuments. Whether this reflected a genuinely new theory of collective governance or a restoration of an older one that a period of powerful individual rulers had only temporarily displaced, the shift in what the city's own labour and resources were spent on is unmistakable in the archaeological record itself.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Ymblanter · CC BY-SA 4.0

A city that stopped growing

contractionDrafted from Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)

Teotihuacan's own later centuries show no dramatic single crisis, only a slow loss of momentum. The city's population, after reaching a plateau of a hundred thousand or more by the 300s, may have begun declining significantly in its final century, though archaeologists still dispute how sharply, since the pottery evidence that would settle the question has not yet been dated precisely enough. Some households remained clearly prosperous even as this happened, and the gap between the wealthiest and poorest residents appears to have widened rather than narrowed as the city's fortunes turned.

Rivals rising as the centre weakened

Elsewhere in central Mexico, new centres such as Xochicalco and Cacaxtla began developing influence of their own - possibly only after Teotihuacan's own fall, but plausibly earlier, as a weakening capital lost its ability to punish upstart neighbours the way it once had. A government that had once relied on conquest and the steady flow of new tribute to fund its own building projects had, without either, few good options: bureaucratic institutions built for growth do not always adapt gracefully to its absence, and there is no sign the city's own rulers in this period found a way to break free of constraints - religious, institutional, or possibly environmental - that a more centralized regime in an earlier age might have simply overridden by force.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Cvmontuy · CC BY-SA 3.0

A capital living on inherited prestige

Whatever combination of causes was at work, none of it was sudden. Teotihuacan in its last century remained, by any regional standard, an enormous and imposing city, its great avenue and pyramids still the largest architectural achievement anyone in central Mexico had ever seen. What it had lost was the ability to keep expanding that prestige into new conquest, new tribute, or new construction - a capital increasingly living on the accumulated weight of what earlier generations had already built rather than adding meaningfully to it.

A fire that spared the people

endDrafted from Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)

Sometime in the 600s or 700s, the physical apparatus of the Teotihuacan state was destroyed by fire. Temples and elite residences, concentrated especially along the central section of the city's own great avenue, were burned and their idols deliberately smashed - a pattern of destruction archaeologists describe as selective rather than indiscriminate, aimed precisely at the buildings and objects that represented state authority rather than at the city as a whole.

Cowgill, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997) · Gary Todd · CC0

Insiders, outsiders, or both

Who carried out the burning remains genuinely disputed. One reading holds that only people with intimate knowledge of the city's own sacred architecture could have known exactly what to target and how to desecrate it most effectively - the act of insiders settling an old account, much as the earlier burning of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid may have been. Another reading holds that centuries of decline had allowed surrounding societies to grow strong enough, in population and organization, to overwhelm a capital that had lost the will or the leadership to defend itself, with any dissident insiders who joined them playing a supporting rather than a leading role. The evidence does not clearly favour either account over the other.

A city that outlived its own empire

What the fire did not do was empty the city outright. A substantial population, perhaps forty thousand people, remained or resettled at Teotihuacan afterward, and the site has remained continuously significant, if never again as a capital, down to the present day. What ended was not the place but its politics: Teotihuacan would go on being a town, sometimes a fairly important one, for the rest of Mesoamerican history, but it never again commanded the kind of regional authority, tribute, or prestige that had let its own rulers raise, without any need to explain themselves in writing, the largest religious monuments the Americas had yet seen.