Teotihuacán

City-state in the northeastern part of the Basin of Mexico which rose to prominence after ad 100 and reached its peak in the early Classic Stage, ad 450–650. The first major excavations in the city were undertaken by Leopoldo Batres in 1905, since when there have been numerous excavations and surveys including work by Ignacio Bernal, René Millon, and William T Saunders.

The name Teotihuacán means ‘place of the gods’ in Nahuatl, and from its inception as an urban centre the site was planned and formally laid out. At the focus was a complex of ceremonial structures arranged along the Street of the Dead, including two massive pyramids, one dedicated to the sun, the other to the moon. A cave discovered under the Pyramid of the Sun in 1971 may have been important as a sacred place where communication with the underworld was possible and therefore the place around which the city grew up.

The city was probably controlled by ritual leaders who also had secular powers. These leaders occupied a series of palaces while the rest of the population lived in large apartment-like compounds set around courtyards.

By the mid first millennium ad, Teotihuacán covered an area of 20 square kilometres and had an estimated population of 125 000–200 000, making it the largest city in the pre-industrial world. It is estimated to have contained about 80 per cent of the inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico. Moreover, its size and importance made it powerful and influential among the emergent states of Mesoamerica during Formative and Classic times. The city's power and position were both created and supported by the fact that it lay on a major trade route, it had control over a major obsidian source, it was favourably located for the development of intensive agriculture, and it may have had important ritual or symbolic connections too. The influence exerted by Teotihuacán extended to the domination of other centres in the vicinity, at times culturally and stylistically through art and architectural styles, trade, and religious guidance, at other times through military domination. After ad 650 the population of Teotihuacán began to decline and by ad 750 the city had been destroyed. No satisfactory explanation for this collapse has been offered, although sacking by rival Chichimecs is one possibility.

[Sum.: R. F. Millon, 1967, Teotihuacán. Scientific American, 216(6), 38–48]