Teotihuacán

Altitude: 2281 m (7484 ft)

How to get there

From Mexico City by metro line 5 to Autobuses del Norte, from there continuing by bus (Counter 8, Bay 6) or line 3 to Indios Verdes, from there also by bus; by car about 50km/31mi on Insurgentes Norte, which turns into the MEX 85.

Teotihuacán, to date the largest pre-Columbian site so far excavated in Meso-America, is situated in an area devoid of all trees, on the edge of the high-lying valley of Anáhuac. Both the symmetry of the enormous site and the unity of its architectural style make it one of the most impressive ruined cities in the world. In the first 600 years ad Teotihuacán was the most influential political, religious and cultural power in Central America. In 1988 Teotihuacán was declared a world cultural heritage site by UNESCO. Nothing is known of the original architects of Teotihuacán (Náhuatl: "place where man becomes God"), their language and more detailed history. It was once thought that the town had been inhabited by the Toltecs and it was only during the excavations at Tula that the discovery was made that Teotihuacán had already been abandoned or destroyed 200 years before the Toltecs came to power. The names which the city and its individual buildings are known by are either derived from Náhuatl or are of recent origin and therefore linguistically have nothing to do with their original creators.

During the period defined as Proto-Teotihuacán (600-200 bc) village communities formed in the area and, towards the end of the period, a much larger village grew up in what became the north-west part of the later city. The earliest obsidian workshops also started at this time. The glasslike, mainly grey and green, obsidian stone was an essential material for many precision tools and important as a commodity in its own right.

The actual emergence of the city itself occurred in the epoch known as Teotihuacán I (200 bc-0), with the north-south axis, the "Street of the Dead" and the main buildings, the sun and moon pyramids, already in place at the end of this period. Influences from Oaxaca are also detectable, as can be deduced from finds from the epoch of Monte Albán II.

In the succeeding period, Teotihuacán II (ad 0-350), the city reached its greatest extent at an estimated 20sq.km/8sq.mi and indeed exceeded the area of the city of Rome as it then was. At this time the sun and moon pyramids were completed and the Quetzalcoátl temple and the citadel were built. In the area of fine arts important "thin orange" ceramics, three-footed cylindrical vessels with lids and monumental sculptures were all created.

The next period, Teotihuacán III (ad 350-650), can be considered the city's heyday, when it probably had as many as 200,000 inhabitants. It is in this period that most of the additions were made to the buildings, principally the Quetzalcóatl temple and the moon pyramid. The Quetzalpapálotl palace was built and most of the wall paintings date from this period. The cultural cross-fertilisation which occurred reciprocally between Teotihuacán and Monte Albán, El Tajín, Panuco, Cholula, Guerrero and the Maya territory to the south reached incredible proportions. During the 5th and 6th c. the city of Teotihuacán exerted its strongest influence on the cultures and civilisations of Meso-America. It is not clear whether this occurred as a result of military conquests or through the peaceful means of politics, trade and religion. In any event there is definite evidence of the dominance which existed in this period in places as far removed from Teotihuacán as Xochichalco (Mor.), Cacaxtla (Tlax.), Kaminaljuyú (Guatemala) and in Petén (Guatemala, especially in Tikal).

It was during the last period, Teotihuacán IV (ad 650-750), which began with further additions to the "Street of the Dead" and the creation of superlative wall paintings and ceramics, that the city came to a sudden and violent end, similar to that which befell the other classic advanced civilisations of Meso-America, albeit 200 years earlier. Although the causes are still not known even today, the fact that the ceremonial centre of the city was systematically destroyed suggests that the priests destroyed their temples themselves while under the sway of some external enemy (probably barbaric tribes from the north-west). It is also possible that uprisings challenging the rule of the priests or an economic crisis may have contributed to the city's downfall. The former metropolis was reduced to a mere regional centre, its 30,000 inhabitants living among the ruins alongside the foreign invaders.

There is no doubt that the collapse of Teotihuacán sent shock waves throughout the whole of Meso-America, with centres of power going into decline and trading routes becoming severed. As a result an overall economic decline set in. For the civilisations which followed, such as the Toltecs and the Aztecs, the abandoned city of Teotihuacán was a ghost-town of mythical origin.After the Conquista

When the Spanish came here in 1519 after their defeat at Tenochtitlán (Noche triste), the old city was completely covered over with earth. The first excavations were undertaken in 1864 by Almaraz and these were followed in the 1880s by those of Désiré Charnay and Leopoldo Batres. Reconstructions carried out at the beginning of the 20th c. partially destroyed and falsified the original outlines of some of the main buildings. Further excavations and restorations carried out under Manuel Gamio and Ignacio Marquina in the 1920s, and other work started in 1962 by the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia, all resulted in outstanding achievements. This work has been continued by the Arizona State University. In 1988 UNESCO declared these ruins of Teotihuacán to be cultural heritage sites.

The Ruins

The site has only been partially uncovered. The archaeological zone extends over an area of more than 20sq.km/8sq.mi, while the actual ceremonial centre occupies a mere 4.2sq.km/1.5sq.mi. When seeing the rather uniform-looking architecture, the observer would do well to remember that originally all the façades of the buildings would have been covered in a multi-coloured layer of stucco and were partly decorated with sculptures.