Teotihuacan

Where it is

Teotihuacan lies in a valley adjoining the Valley of Mexico, about 40 kilometres north-east of the modern city centre, at roughly 2,300 metres. The site is laid out on a single axis some fifteen degrees east of north — the Avenue of the Dead — with the Pyramid of the Sun on its eastern side, the Pyramid of the Moon closing its northern end, and a grid of apartment compounds extending for kilometres around them. The valley has springs and obsidian, and both mattered.

The land and water around it

• The Teotihuacan valleybasin

  A side valley of the Basin of Mexico with springs supporting irrigation — enough water and enough farmland to feed a very large population in one place.

• The obsidian sourcesvolcano

  Volcanic glass deposits nearby, including Pachuca's distinctive green obsidian. Teotihuacan obsidian is found across Mesoamerica, which is how the city's reach is traced.

• The San Juan riverriver

  A small river that the builders canalised and made to conform to the city's grid, which tells you how seriously the plan was taken.

Its history, in short

Teotihuacan grew from the first century CE into one of the largest cities in the world of its time, then declined and was substantially burned in the sixth or seventh century — before the Mexica existed. When the Mexica encountered the ruins centuries later they gave them the Nahuatl name we still use and treated the place as ancient and significant, which it already was. Almost everything about the people who built it is unresolved, including what language they spoke, and there is no evidence of a single named ruler in its art at all.

Timeline

Dates are shown on a timeline rather than as changing shapes on the map. The globe draws modern boundaries only, and tinting a modern outline to stand for a historical one would state something we cannot source.

Places that carry meaning

• The Pyramid of the Sun1st–2nd centuries CE

  The largest structure on the site, built over a cave or tunnel that appears to have been part of why the location was chosen.

• The apartment compounds3rd–6th centuries

  Walled multi-family residential blocks with internal courtyards, laid out on the grid. Housing at this scale and standardisation is unusual anywhere in the ancient world and is the strongest evidence for how the city was organised.

• The Feathered Serpent Pyramidc. 200 CE

  Carved with feathered serpent heads, and associated with a large number of sacrificial burials of individuals dressed as warriors — one of the few places the city's iconography addresses violence directly.

Learn the language here

1. 1Understand which languages are spoken hereTeotihuacan is multilingual. Start with which languages are used, by whom, and for what — the phrase list only covers one of them.Written by Globe Quest

Check yourself

• Who named Teotihuacan?

  The Mexica, centuries after it was abandoned

  Every familiar name at the site is a Nahuatl description of ruins the Mexica inherited.

• What is conspicuously absent from Teotihuacan's art?

  Named individual rulers

  Unlike Maya cities, Teotihuacan's imagery does not celebrate named rulers, which is central to arguments about how it was governed.

Worth arguing about

• A city of this size with no named rulers in its art. What might that mean, and what would count as evidence either way?
• Everything we call this place is a later people's word for somebody else's ruins. How much does a name shape what we think a place was?

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