Video: Teotihuacan: Origins, Urbanism, and Daily Life
Teotihuacan, one of the largest cities in the world over 1,500 years ago, stands today as a premier archaeological site and a powerful symbol of Mexico’s precolonial heritage. Despite its enduring fame and millions of annual visitors, much remains misunderstood about the Teotihuacanos who built and inhabited this extraordinary city. This lecture delves into the intricate history of Teotihuacan, exploring its rise as a multiethnic metropolis and a center of innovation. David Carballo examines the city's immediate antecedents and urbanization, its unique architectural hallmark of apartment-style living, and the dynamic networks of migration and cultural exchange that shaped its identity. By connecting the iconic pyramids to the daily lives of the city's inhabitants, this talk offers a deeper understanding of one of the ancient world’s most fascinating urban centers.
2025 Gordon R. Willey Lecture by David M. Carballo, Professor of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Latin American Studies, Boston University
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Museums of Science & Culture in collaboration with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University.
Recorded April 2, 202
Transcript
Teotihuacan: Origins, Urbanism, and Daily Life
[00:00:12.08] Good evening, everyone. Welcome. My name is Jane Pickering, and I'm the William and Muriel Seabury House Director of the Peabody Museum. And really excited to be here with you tonight, and also to welcome our Zoom audience online to the Gordon R. Willey Lecture, co-sponsored by the Peabody and also the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.
[00:00:39.03] And we're honored tonight to have Professor David Carballo from Boston University. And he is going to be discussing the history, urban development, and cultural complexity of Teotihuacan-- I imagine many people in the audience have probably been there-- and revealing how it became an innovative metropolis and a lasting symbol of Mexico's ancient heritage. So you'll hear more from the person coming up after me about the topic and Gordon Willey and our lecturer, but I have a few housekeeping, informational things to say.
[00:01:17.99] Firstly, for those of you who are here in person, I invite you to join us in the galleries at the museum on the third floor for some wine and cheese and conversation. So I hope those of you here are able to come.
[00:01:32.37] Also, some upcoming events for the Peabody. Firstly, this Sunday, April 6, we're hosting our annual Amazing Archaeology Fair in the museum, which is really great fun. It's especially great for families, and we have graduate students who are talking to people about their research. It's really a great program, so hopefully people can make that.
[00:01:54.17] And then on Sunday, April 13, we have two special events to explore the art of wampum, an integral part of Native American History and Culture. And we're delighted to be doing that with Elizabeth James-Perry, an artist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe. So to learn more about those events and other events and exhibitions, you can go to our website, which has the fairly logical address of peabody.harvard.edu. And we are also very grateful to all members and supporters for making these programs possible.
[00:02:29.35] So now I get off the stage to introduce someone far more interesting, which is William Fash-- Bill Fash, as we all know him, who's the Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology in Harvard's Department of Anthropology. One of my amazing, distinguished predecessors is Director of the Peabody Museum. And he's going to introduce our speaker, and I suspect say something about Gordon Willey, and kick us off for a wonderful evening. Thank you.
[00:03:01.94] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:12.13] My, full house. So good evening, and welcome, everybody. It's great to see so many of you out here on a cool April evening. But with this speaker, obviously, all of you are the cool people, because you know the right place to be. It's a pleasure, really, honestly, a great pleasure for me to introduce our distinguished speaker tonight, David M. Carballo, Professor of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Latin America at Boston University. He's a master at all three. He's an amazing scholar. And the topic is, as our students say, epic.
[00:03:48.23] [LAUGHTER]
[00:03:49.45] The Gordon Willey Lecture is the result of a generous gift by my old classmate, Richard Leventhal, who was our last Gordon Willey Lecture honoree and is the pride now of the University of Pennsylvania. As always, I'd like to thank Richard for his generosity and vision in making this series possible to bring extraordinary archaeologists to Harvard to share their work. Richard sends his regrets, but he's in Yucatan, attending to pressing matters related to his own community archaeology project on the archaeology of the Maya caste war.
[00:04:23.52] Professor Carballo has always been what my mentor, the late, great Gordon Willey, most admired in a terrific archaeology, what Willey termed a big picture scholar. David has written incisively and extensively on a broad array of topics that are on the leading edge of scholarship in Mesoamerican archaeology and beyond, including obsidian production, political economy and organization, the role and expressions of religion, and the development of complex society and urbanism, cooperation frameworks for governance structures, and the collision of worlds in Mexico with the arrival of Cortés on the shores of Veracruz in 1519.
[00:05:09.68] Remarkably, each of his books seems to surpass its predecessors in terms of intellectual breadth and depth. And the array of topics that he's tackled is exceptional. These include his highly respected first monograph on Teotihuacan, the 2011 volume Obsidian and the Teotihuacan State, Weaponry and Ritual Production at the Moon Pyramid. Then his 2013 edited volume on Cooperation and Collective Action, Archaeological Perspectives, which was far ahead of its time. And the deeply insightful 2016 Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico.
[00:05:50.01] Since then, his interests and publications have focused on Teotihuacan households and long-distance exchange and political alliances. This focus led to the highly regarded 2020 Dumbarton Oaks volume, Teotihuacan, The World Beyond the City, co-edited with Kenn Hirth and Bárbara Arroyo, and Collective Action and the Reframing of Early Mesoamerica, with the distinguished Gary Feinman, published by the Cambridge University Press.
[00:06:18.69] In the 2020 volume, Collision of Worlds, A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain, Carballo's broad and deep understandings of the great sweep of sociocultural development in Highland Central Mexico served him very well. His intellectual range can also be readily appreciated by the many quite different specialized journals in which he has published just over the past two years. To name but a few, these include Urban Studies, Religion, Brain & Behavior, the Journal of Social Computing, Latin American Antiquity twice in one year alone, and Arqueología Mexicana. For the last two years, he's also served on the journal's editorial boards over the last two.
[00:07:09.90] The Collision of Worlds book propelled him quickly to full professor status at Boston University where his formidable talents and organization, collective efforts, and insightful analysis likewise resulted in him being tapped as the Assistant Professor for General Education. Talk about a thankless job.
[00:07:30.79] [LAUGHTER]
[00:07:31.18] We all appreciate that you did that. His academic service outside of his university has also been exceptional, and his public outreach equally exemplary. This by any reasonable measure-- this is, by any reasonable measure, a mature scholar at the height of his intellectual powers who has earned the universal respect of his colleagues in Mesoamerican archaeology and anthropology, and I can tell you that is no mean feat.
[00:08:00.84] Like his father, Manuel Carballo, for whom the Excellence in Teaching Award is named and granted each year at the Kennedy School of Government here at Harvard, David is a legendary teacher. So inspiring, in fact, that his students at BU are proud to call him Captain Carballo!
[00:08:21.38] [LAUGHTER]
[00:08:23.55] With an exclamation point. Tonight, we're very pleased that David's mother, Ann has joined us. He dedicated his last book to her for all that she taught him about differences between cultures, as well, of course, as his accomplished spouse, Jenny.
[00:08:42.55] The topic tonight is the focus of his current book project, what will surely be the best single-author treatment of the city of the gods in Mexico, which he'll tell you about now. For all these reasons, I'd like to ask you to join me in a very warm welcome for an extraordinary scholar and person, Professor David Manuel Caballo.
[00:09:03.44] [APPLAUSE]
[00:09:17.60] Thanks, Jane and Bill, for that very generous introduction and the invitation to be here today. I'm grateful for all of you for attending, either here in person or watching online. And for the last especialmente los amigos en México por Teotihuacan y otros rumbos. Saludos estoy muy agradecido por su presencia.
[00:09:39.07] I also have lots of local roots, not only a professor at BU, but I grew up in the area. And so I have a lot of dear friends and family here. I have colleagues from BU. And I'm very grateful to all of you for your support.
[00:09:52.73] As Bill mentioned, my dad briefly taught here at the K school. And maybe it was a little bit in the cards that I would one day work at Teotihuacan, because here he is in 1970 on the Sun Pyramid, during his honeymoon at Teotihuacan.
[00:10:08.78] And unfortunately, he left us too soon. But the woman who took this photo, my mother, Ann is here today. And I'd like to thank her for everything that she's done to get me started, and that includes being here at the Peabody Museum in the mid '90s and attending a talk. And I had just graduated with a degree in political science, but I was getting into archaeology later in my undergrad career.
[00:10:33.06] And she picked up a brochure for this field school, and it was the Copan field school run by Harvard. And as you can see, this actually probably isn't the brochure she got. But I expressed my interest in it, and Bill, with a little Post-it note still here, sent me the updated version later.
[00:10:52.43] So my mom is also a collector, and that could be good or bad. But I think archaeologists ourselves, we collect old things. And I particularly value this memento I have.
[00:11:04.63] And it's there in Copan that I made my greatest discovery as an archaeologist, and that, of course, is my wife, Jenny, who is here. And she's actually very frequently here because she works at the Peabody Museum.
[00:11:17.76] [LAUGHTER]
[00:11:18.22] So she's often in the halls of this building. But thank you to you both for all your support throughout the years. So this is the Gordon Willey Lecture. And Willey was an exceptional character in Americanist archaeology. And I think-- I was trying to think of, what are the ways that what I do reflects the legacy of Willey?
[00:11:41.35] And in particular, he's the person, I think more than any other, who in the mid 20th century started to shift the archaeological gaze from just the pyramids, palaces, and tombs to the big picture, the entire settlement systems, how people lived across a landscape, mapping entire regions of ancient settlement. Then also moving to map very big cities in Mesoamerica. And this includes Copan itself with Bill, with Richard Leventhal and others involved in this event today.
[00:12:15.07] So just thinking about-- if we were to understand Washington, DC, today, but all we knew about it was a little bit of the White House and a little bit of the Lincoln Memorial or something else along the Mall, we wouldn't really have an understanding of how this ancient city functioned and what the lived reality was for most of the people who lived there. And so that's what I'd like to do tonight in Willey's legacy, is to balance the focus that has been so often told on the big pyramids of Teotihuacan with how people lived, and this really fascinating way of living that they had, which was to create apartments, multi-family apartments, that housed almost the entire city.
[00:12:55.70] And so we get little glimpses of daily life in some of the art. A lot of it is monumental, but some of it has more humble things. People harvesting plants, people using pottery types. And that will be a little more of my focus.
[00:13:08.88] And part of that is because one of the main questions we get as archaeologists of the city is, who built this place? How do I slot my understanding of Mesoamerica with groups like the Aztecs and Mayas to this city?
[00:13:22.70] Well, Teotihuacan was built by the Teotihuacanos. That's not always a perfectly satisfactory answer. What does that mean? They are the precursors to the Aztecs, about 1,000 years before in Central Mexico. And they were contemporaries with the classic period Maya and other groups within Mesoamerica that we'll look at today. So I think taking this perspective, this view, especially away from the pyramids, can help with defining and reclaiming who the Teotihuacanos were.
[00:13:51.14] So in Aztec eyes, Teotihuacan was never a lost city. Sometimes you'll see a documentary where it's like the Aztecs are stumbling across Teotihuacan, and they seem surprised. That never would have been the case. There were tens of thousands of Aztec peoples living in the Teotihuacan Valley. And some of the ruins would have looked like this late 19th century picture here. So you have, for instance, the Sun Pyramid still not excavated and covered in vegetation. It's a semi-arid landscape, so you can see these things.
[00:14:22.60] But it was also a place of profound cosmological significance. For the Aztecs, the Mexica Aztecs, and other Aztec peoples, this was the place where the fifth son of creation came into being. So it is the birthplace of the modern act of creation. It's a place where the calendar started. It's a place where what they thought of as civilization was codified.
[00:14:45.93] And you get that in some documents like these pictorial documents written by Nahuas or Nahuatl-speaking peoples and Otomí-speaking peoples, which are the main two linguistic groups of this area. And then in some alphabetic texts that we also have from the 16th century like this one, that through this act of divine sacrifice, the current era of being came into existence at Teotihuacan.
[00:15:13.05] So it was this cosmologically charged and special place. At the same time, it's very clear that the Mexica Aztecs and other groups knew that Teotihuacanos had a material culture not so different from their own. And for that, I really love this piece over here. This is a-- it's called the Malinaltepec mask. And it depicts a Teotihuacan mask from the classic period of the city, or a sculpted stone face, to which an Aztec artisan has applied this turquoise and spondylus shell overlay. And it's a great visual metaphor for a later civilization building on the foundations of Teotihuacan.
[00:15:52.78] And this continued throughout the 20th century. Post-independence from Spain, Teotihuacan became the backdrop, especially in the 20th century, of many of the major calendrical rituals of the new nation of Mexico. And that includes commemorating the Centennial of Independence from Spain in 1910 by reconstructing the Sun Pyramid and having a big conference there with a lot of academic luminaries.
[00:16:19.13] It also, in the 1960s, involved recreating the Street of the Dead that as a tourist you would walk along today, including the Moon Pyramid. And that was just in time for the Olympics to come to Mexico City. So what you're looking at over here is the Olympic torch and some ceremony being associated. So Teotihuacan then was the backdrop for nation-making in the 20th century Mexico.
[00:16:43.35] Today, those of you who've been to Mexico City or have gone to the site know that there's signs like this one that just say, Pyramids This Way. It doesn't even say Teotihuacan. It's just like, this is how you get to the pyramids. This is how the site is famously known. And contemporary communities like those that we work with around the site-- San Juan Teotihuacan, San Martín de Las Pirámides-- these were all Aztec period occupations that then became colonial cities and now are modern towns today.
[00:17:15.36] So going back a little bit before Teotihuacan really takes off as this important place is what's known in Central Mexico as the formative period. And I've also-- and Jenny, we've both worked in this period. We're interested in, what came before Teotihuacan? What were the roots of this classic period civilization?
[00:17:34.62] And for that, you can see a few different things that coalesce into what we know as Teotihuacano urbanism. For instance, we start seeing particular deities rendered in these sorts of effigies. And the effigies really embody the principles, the sacred divine principles that they stood for.
[00:17:55.11] So the storm god is a water vessel. So you would hold water in that vessel, and it's depicting the god of rain or the storm god. Whereas over here-- the Aztecs would call him Tlaloc. Over here, you have what the Aztecs would call Huehueteotl, the god of fire, and he's a literal incense burner. So they are personifying the primal elements that they represent. And you see this in 1,000 years leading up to Teotihuacan, and it continues. So there are those sorts of continuities.
[00:18:22.50] We can also see some continuities in the way people laid out domestic space. So over here, we have some work done by two of my colleagues, Patricia Plunket and Gabriela Uruñuela, who either gave this lecture or the Proskouriakoff one a few years ago. And their work is really exceptional because this site, Tetimpa Village, was covered by that volcano, Popocatépetl, in the first century BCE. It's not a huge settlement, but that allowed for excellent preservation of houses and understanding how people lived.
[00:18:55.51] And so they excavated some 25 to 30 of these houses. And it shows the layout, this typical layout of what we would call a patio group, these three buildings around a central patio with an altar in its center. The buildings also have this form that in Mexico is called talud-tablero. It's a talus-sloped wall and an upright wall. And this becomes iconic at Teotihuacan. So all these things are predecessors to what we'll see later in Teotihuacan.
[00:19:24.28] We'll also start to see some differentiation socially based on status. And we can see this in people's houses. So for instance, over down here, these are non-elite houses drawn to scale with some elite houses, one we excavated at a site called La Laguna and another at Cuicuilco, which was the big rival city early in Teotihuacan's ascent in the basin of Mexico.
[00:19:50.66] So this volcanic eruption really started the urbanization of Teotihuacan. And so again, mid-first century BC, that's now re-dated. It originally was thought to be 100 years later. But Claus Siebe, a volcanologist at the National University in Mexico City, just has recently re-dated it to a little earlier. And that really works with how Teotihuacan takes off in the first century BCE.
[00:20:16.20] So this was a huge volcanic eruption that spewed lava and lahars all over this area that dotted line is depicting. And the southern areas of Central Mexico were lusher, more popul-- early population lived in them. And they then needed to migrate. And many of them migrated north to the Teotihuacan Valley, and others migrated East to two other cities that grew in the classic period called Cholula and Cantona.
[00:20:43.93] The other volcanic eruption that often was implicated in Teotihuacan's rise is a place called Xitle, which is in the southwest of the Basin of Mexico. And I should point out, just to get your orientation, modern Mexico City consumes a lot of this ancient lake system today. So Mexico City's over there. And those of you who've traveled there might have been to Xochimilco or other places where there's lakes to the South, but these vestigial lakes of this system. So the Xitle volcano covered Cuicuilco, this big rival city to Teotihuacan. But that was after Teotihuacan had already taken off as a big place.
[00:21:22.77] This map is a little confusing, and I'll just try to unpack it a little. But what I want to just show is that there were multiple groups that we can see in settlement. So building on Willey, a archaeologist named Bill Sanders surveyed the entire Teotihuacan Valley. And then another archaeologist named René Millon surveyed the city itself.
[00:21:45.10] And what I've done here is combined data from both those surveys to show an earlier phase of the first two centuries BC where there was this different occupation, these white sites that are called Tezoyuca and these black sites that are called Cuanalan. People used to think they were sequential phases. Cuanalan came first and then Tezoyuca, and people moved up to the hills for a while. And then they went down to the valley again and founded Teotihuacan.
[00:22:12.61] We now know that there was overlap. So Linda Manzanilla, a prominent archaeologist in Mexico, has worked down here at Cuanalan and showed that it is occupied at the same time as the Tezoyuca phase.
[00:22:24.24] So what we really seem to be looking at instead are two different populations who laid out their sites differently, who lived in slightly different parts of the valley, who made slightly different types of pottery. And this is really fascinating because we now know that there seemed to have been flows, not just coming from the East and South, but also influence coming from West Mexico.
[00:22:46.05] And this is something that Mexican archaeologists have talked about for a long time. In fact, 100 years ago, there was an archaeologist, Eduardo Noguera, who analyzed the ceramics inside the Sun Pyramid and said, there's a West Mexican connection here. And more recently, an archaeologist named Jorge Angulo talks about this being the meeting of these populations and the coalescing into, over here, the city of Teotihuacan.
[00:23:09.78] And what this sort of blob indicates is where there's this sort of pottery. And what you can see is that there seem to be a few nodes. It's not just one center. There's maybe at least two, three different settlements. So it was people coming together as part of this initial urbanization process.
[00:23:28.50] So that image I just showed with the blob is this outline that's over here. So those two nodes of early settlement. Later though, the city became planned to the southeast. And here, you see the map of the city as mapped by René Millon. So this is what it would have looked like some 500, 600 years later once it was a mature city.
[00:23:50.38] But we have these wonderful quotes like this one over here from the 16th century. So this would be a Nahuatl-speaking scribe who notes "There were pyramids to the sun and the moon. They look like mountains, but they were built by hand. And the hollow where they found the stone is behind the pyramids." So they were telling you exactly-- and all of this has been borne out.
[00:24:11.80] So these hollows are what we would call quarry pits. Everything you see shaded in gray here are areas that have been mapped using geological and geophysical techniques by one of my collaborators, Luis Barba, at Mexico's National University. And so those are areas that were quarried out to build these big pyramids and build the center of this new city.
[00:24:36.84] If any of you have eaten in a restaurant at Teotihuacan called La Gruta, then this is an example of those artificial cavities that are around the site. And some of them have ceremonial functions like this one, which is for tracking the zenith passage of the sun.
[00:24:52.61] So this mix of negative space of a cave, a excavated area to create the positive space that is a mountain, really connects with Aztec and other Central Mexican religion in this area. So for instance, we have hieroglyphs in the Teotihuacan writing system for cave and mountain, which are obvious direct precursors to the Aztec writing of the same that you see there. So the writing systems are connected.
[00:25:23.57] We can also see this in more pictorial art, like this image down here where you see on the right, there's a cave with a spring in it that is feeding water into this tall water mountain. So they've now animated these two hieroglyphs into a scene that's showing this imagery.
[00:25:42.56] The pyramids themselves express this same concept. They are water mountains. They are places with sacred caves beneath them. This one, unfortunately, had been looted when archaeologists discovered it. But this one, Sergio Gómez, who has presented here at Harvard, recently excavated and was found intact.
[00:25:59.93] So it is a symbolic cave underneath a human-made mountain, a human-made sacred mountain. There's other imagery associated with these pyramids, but I'm not going to get into that. That's another talk, and I want to get to the apartments.
[00:26:15.37] But just very quickly, when looking at these hieroglyphs over here and this continuity between Teotihuacan and the Aztec writing system, that brings up some other recent work that we have coming out of the University of Copenhagen, where Magnus Pharao, Chris Helmke, and Jesper Nielsen have recently argued that you can read the Teotihuacan hieroglyphs in a Southern Uto-Aztecan language.
[00:26:40.81] And so that means it would be directly related, though distant, 1,000 years separated, from Nahuatl or Cora or Huichol, or other southern Uto-Aztecan languages. So in some ways, you could think a little bit like the English we speak compared to Beowulf, or something like that. There would be that much sort of linguistic drift, or even more because it was largely an oral language.
[00:27:04.52] So this is really fascinating. The epigraphers and linguists will certainly debate this for a while, and I will stand on the sidelines as an archaeologist. But I think that you can see some of these two connections, the Western Mesoamerican connection that would have been this southern Uto-Aztecan in the early formation of Teotihuacan. So I'm compelled by their argument.
[00:27:27.26] So what then makes Teotihuacan a really unique space? Is it that it was a really large population of over 100,000 people? Well, that's quite remarkable, but no, there were other large settlements like that early on. The big pyramids? No. In fact, the Sun Pyramid wasn't even the biggest pyramid in Central Mexico. Cholula's was. So Cholula in volume is the largest pyramid anywhere in the world.
[00:27:52.82] The grid plan? No, we have lots of other cultures like the Greeks and Chinese who made gridded cities. The fact that we get lots of tourists like over here, Jim Morrison communing with the feathered serpent? And those of you who don't know, the new fire ceremony is a ritual that the Aztecs practiced that seems to have gone back to Teotihuacan. Bill, Barb, and Alex Tokovinine have written an article about this. No, it's also not that, although it's wonderful to have such interest in the site and millions of tourists arriving every year.
[00:28:23.66] What really sets Teotihuacan apart is that it was a city, starting at about 250 to 300, where almost everybody lived in multi-family apartments. And this is something at this scale of over 100,000 people that is unknown for the pre-modern world.
[00:28:40.88] So what you're looking at over here is a map of Teotihuacan with its rough contemporary imperial Rome. They were occupied around the same time. You can see they're to scale. So the footprint of Teotihuacan is comparable to Rome's. But Rome had more people, because they had multi-story living like you see on the left over here.
[00:28:59.90] So the Roman apartments, called insulae, were lower status housing. About 25% of the city's population lived in them, and they were renters. And they were not nice places, especially the upper floors where they would have been fire hazards.
[00:29:15.39] Teotihuacan's apartments, in contrast, were relatively spacious. They were single-story or ranch-type living, like this that you see over here, and relatively comfortable. So even though Rome did have apartments, they're a quite different form of housing. And the urban renewal project that Teotihuacan underwent in the middle of its history is relatively remarkable.
[00:29:40.84] So here, you're looking at some themes that exist in a Teotihuacan apartment compound with a little flyover over here that shows you these patio groups. The patio groups are basically what we saw earlier at Tetimpa over here, so the buildings arranged around a patio with a central altar. That's a premise we had seen earlier in the formative period.
[00:30:04.05] Then there are individual room units that are shaded in colors over here. We can see some of that in earlier dense settlements like Cuicuilco. But really, nobody put these two things together and made these massive apartments until around the third century at Teotihuacan, and nobody else again would in Mesoamerica. So the Toltecs, who are a little after the Teotihuacanos, had a few apartments, but it wasn't the dominant housing type afterwards.
[00:30:34.30] So one of the most amazing things about these apartments is that there's first, somewhere between 2,000 to 2,300 of them across the city. And this is actually easy to count, because it's a semi-arid landscape and it'd been mapped.
[00:30:49.42] They're relatively large and spacious. Maybe the average one held about 60 people. They're organized into these districts. They had their own craft production specialties within them. They had high immigration to them, and were multi-ethnic spaces. And over here, this chart gives you an estimate of the labor that would have gone into all the apartments at the bottom compared to these really big pyramids.
[00:31:15.07] And I'm drawing here on a colleague, Tatsuya Murakami, who's at Tulane, who did these experimental analyses of, how long does it take to quarry the stone, find the rubble, make the adobes, put the lime plaster on, and do some calculations for estimates of buildings? It doesn't have everything that's in the center of the site. But even if you added up those three pyramids in that big palace complex and added a few more palaces that we know from the center of the site, it would still be only about half the labor that went into building all the apartments.
[00:31:46.72] So this is really the unique thing about Teotihuacan. The building went into housing people. And in today's world where we're talking about housing crises and finding enough housing for cities, the Teotihuacanos somehow managed to do it in the third century, and it's an amazing story. I wish we had more of the texts. We're looking archaeologically on the processes by which this happened. So because of this, I propose we change those signs that are leading from the city.
[00:32:14.59] [LAUGHTER]
[00:32:14.97] This isn't the city of pyramids. It's really the city of apartments. That's what makes it stand out as a unique place in the world. So we can get a lot from these apartments just by looking-- I mean, there's 2,300 of them, and probably maybe 20 have been excavated, and maybe about-- I don't know-- five to 10 using modern techniques. So we only have a small sample of what they really look like.
[00:32:39.12] But in some cases, we have complete floor plans like this. And on the bottom, you can-- these are all to scale, so you can probably appreciate that on the left, people had bigger rooms to live in. Their apartment units were more spacious. And that's just summarized with the bar chart and the blue on the top over there.
[00:32:56.45] The second one is looking at public space. So what's shaded in gray are the communal courtyards and patios that were within these apartments. And so we get a rough progression. None of these are the highest status elite houses, but from an upper middle class, if you will, to a working class apartment compound, that sort of spread in terms of the amount of living space per apartment unit and public space available.
[00:33:26.55] These were also multi-ethnic places. These were places that people moved to throughout Teotihuacan's history. And first, we could see that just in terms of goods that people had. So for instance, most notably, there's writing in the Maya hieroglyphic system and writing in the Zapotec system from Oaxaca that's different from the Teotihuacan system. So that's pretty obvious that you have at least three writing systems in the city, deities that are slightly different, figurine types.
[00:33:56.54] And even in one case, we have different houses. So these folks were not living in apartments in the east of the city. They seem to have been tied to the Gulf Coast, and they were traders. And one of the really fascinating things-- this is called the Merchant's Barrio-- is it seems that the women were largely local and kept a matrilocal residence pattern, whereas the men were a mix of some locals, but mostly people who were from the Gulf or areas to the Southeast of Mesoamerica.
[00:34:26.15] And they were merchants moving commerce between those lowlands and the city, and then marrying into these matrilocal households. And so that's a slightly different pattern than what we have other places where there seems to be more patrilocal residents in certain apartments. So what this talks about is a real flexibility in residence rules for economic purposes.
[00:34:50.87] More recently, we can study migration through bone isotope analyses. And these have been building, and they've been improving. Before, people would just look at one element. Now they look at two or three at least. So some of these numbers will change, but they give us a sense of pretty much continual migration to the city.
[00:35:08.87] There was high infant mortality in the city, like there were in other pre-modern cities, because disease can spread in really dense areas, as we all know too well from COVID. But in this case, it seems like people were migrating at low levels-- in some apartments, maybe 15% of the population might have been born outside of Teotihuacan-- to these sorts of districts over here where it might have been 30% to 40% were born outside of Teotihuacan, to these ethnic enclaves that are in the bottom where there were specialists coming from Oaxaca or trading from the Gulf, and maybe 80% of them could have been born somewhere else.
[00:35:51.28] And one of the incredible things about the organization of Teotihuacan is it's not just this central precinct. There are districts that all also have their own sort of urban amenities associated with them. And so far, two are really well known by my Mexican colleagues. La Ventilla by Ruben Cabrera and Sergio Gómez and team, and Teopancazco by Linda Manzanilla and team.
[00:36:16.24] They're both close to the center of the site. And they have these mix of public and private spaces, these apartments and then places where there were temples and administrative buildings.
[00:36:28.38] So just to zoom in on one of those, this is the most extensively excavated one, La Ventilla. And over here, you see an apartment compound. And this is called the Artisan's Compound because there was a lot of different craft specialization. People were making things out of bone, obsidian, and stone, including these really nice stone masks like the one I showed earlier.
[00:36:51.76] Then down here in the bottom of the slide, you have an administrative complex that had some elite residences, and then you also have a temple complex over here. So this would have been more the public space along with this plaza. And you can also see streets winding through in between these spaces, including a well. And so this is where Teotihuacanos would get their drinking water. They tapped into the groundwater. So a public plaza that had a well for water distribution and these public spaces.
[00:37:22.74] Urban scholars today talk about this, and how important it is to have civic and social infrastructure. Social infrastructure are those places where people can come together recreationally, more informally within neighborhoods.
[00:37:36.42] So some of you might recognize this image on the bottom left. It's the playground off of Cambridge Common. That would be an example of social infrastructure, right? Places where people gather. And it builds community bonds. It builds neighborhood resiliency.
[00:37:51.48] We also have examples from the Aztec world like on the top left. They were called calpolco, the place of the calpulli. The calpulli was your extended kin network. And so literally, it means "your big house." So it was the larger group of affiliations that you had within the city. And those included temples, marketplaces, and schools. And so that's what this image is depicting over here, a father dropping his kids off at school.
[00:38:17.96] So-- oh, I forgot. There's these other slides. So this mask-- so they were making the masks here on the top compound over here. And then we find one deposited in the temple complex over here. So we probably have the origin and the use space of it. The administrative complex has a floor full of hieroglyphs. So some sort of administrative activities of debated function happening there.
[00:38:44.05] OK. So we have those two district centers close to the center of the city. What we've been doing recently at Tlajinga is looking more at the periphery of the city.
[00:38:57.74] And here, just to give you a Boston perspective on the scale of Teotihuacan and for BU students, I like to superimpose the map of the city to scale over a Google Earth image of Boston. And for these purposes, I've made east up for Boston. So we have the central artery of BU, which is Commonwealth Avenue. But also, you can think of the Mass Pike or even the Charles River as this sort of central thoroughfare for the city.
[00:39:23.85] So if you're on the BU campus like you're in Tlajinga where we are today at the Peabody, we would be in the breadbasket, the irrigation area. To get up to the Sun Pyramid would be like walking to Boston Common. And to get over to the old city, where the earliest occupation of the city was, that would be like walking to the north end. And this is all walking, of course. You don't have the Green Line at your disposal, which, of course, sometimes can be slower than walking, but I think they're--
[00:39:51.58] [LAUGHTER]
[00:39:51.87] --working on it, and I'm optimistic they will sort that out. Usually, it's a little faster. So you can also see that Teotihuacanos wouldn't have really liked Boston's layout. So they were highly organized. Except for the Back Bay where you have a grid, everything else sort of is a mess in our fair city. And the Teotihuacanos laid out this really impressive, orthogonal, organized city.
[00:40:16.93] So where we've been working to the south of the city is more peripheral. And there was previously one project over here run by a Penn State project at a place called Tlajinga 33. It was documented to be a non-elite, commoner, working class compound.
[00:40:33.89] Since then, we've worked at two other apartment compounds, and they seem to be a little higher status because they're along the continuation of the Street of the Dead here. And now, we've also turned our attention to the neighborhood center and more public buildings down here, so I will take you through those.
[00:40:51.09] First, that place. Tlajinga 33, this was a compound inhabited by potters. So these people were making utilitarian pottery, the workhorse pottery for cooking and food processing in the city known as San Martín orange. And so you have these amphora that they would make. You have the smoothers for the clay. You have pieces that were misfired in production associated with this. So we know that they were potters.
[00:41:18.88] More recently, we've worked at two compounds abutting the Street of the Dead. And again, it gives you this scale of how far-- these are big pyramids, of course-- and how far back we are from there, some three kilometers from the Sun Pyramid.
[00:41:35.25] In this particular excavation, we were fortunate to be able to go down. And this is something that you can't always do in Teotihuacan, because you don't want to dismantle nicely made architecture that's the latest phase of construction.
[00:41:48.93] But in this case, there were earthen floors in this southern sector of this particular apartment, so we could excavate down through them and get this whole stratigraphic sequence to try to understand the evolution of apartments in this area. And so what we saw is an earlier rural occupation of folks living with this sort of earthen floor and posts of their house, shifting over time to when you get up to here, you see the walls of apartment buildings.
[00:42:17.07] So it would have been something like this, a transition from this type of housing, of a wattle and daub or in Nahuatl [NAHUATL], which actually is the root of the English word "shack," this particular type of house, moving to the apartments that we know in the fully urbanized city, happening somewhere around 300 to 350 of the common era, a little later than in the center of the city. So that transition to apartments took about 100 years and spread out from the center, out to the periphery.
[00:42:47.61] And what we have here then are all the trappings of domesticity in these apartments. So we have-- for instance, many of you might know what a mano and metate looks like. This is the quern for grinding maize, right?
[00:43:01.31] And here, we actually have-- it's a little hard to see, but this is carbonized maize, the husk of maize. So those of you who eat tamales probably could imagine the tamale being right in there. And it's wonderful when it's preserved to that level. We just had good preservation for a bunch of corn cobs that seem to have been richly lit on fire.
[00:43:19.69] We have tools for scraping the agave plant or hunting. We have a woman's hair pin that's on the far left over here. We have these little ritual incense burners. And this is something you don't find every day. It is a fossilized Miocene shark's tooth that somebody turned into a pendant. So obviously, my sons thought this was the coolest thing I've ever discovered. It's, like, 40 million years old. It is not contemporary with the city. Somebody found it in a fossil bed, and they made it into a nice little pendant.
[00:43:53.33] Obsidian was one of the main trades of the folks who lived in this-- to the east of the Street of the Dead, in an apartment compound named number 17. We did some auguring of where-- to try to find density of obsidian. You could see it all over the surface, but we wanted to see, where is it densest below the surface?
[00:44:12.66] And what you can see is our excavation actually wasn't even in the densest area. Yet in this tiny little excavation area, we uncovered some 450 kilograms of obsidian. So this is extremely dense obsidian production. And thankfully, they were not only leaving the garbage behind, they kept some of the complete pieces and were offering them in the house. And so we have all of these blade cores and other objects. And so that really helps us to reconstruct the production sequence and see, in this case, that there was apprenticeship happening within the family compound.
[00:44:49.69] So next week, I'm going to chip obsidian with some BU undergrads. I used to be pretty good at this when I was working on my dissertation. Since then, I only do it, like, once a year, and my skills have really gone downhill.
[00:45:03.49] But you can see just from visually, here's a nicely made dart point. Here's a very not so nicely made dart point to the left. And here's one where someone sort of is getting the hang of it, but they've made a couple errors. These would be called hinge fractures.
[00:45:19.42] Same thing over here. It's an exceptional blade core. Even at my best, I could never make something like that. And there's someone else who's just getting started with the trade. So we see some sort of apprenticeship happening within the apartments.
[00:45:33.32] How then would the production that's going on in houses or apartments connect with the wider city? So I've now excavated at two obsidian workshops, and the first one was right next to the Moon Pyramid, one of the major temples of the city. And there, there was a very specialized form of mass production. People were making weapons, they were making dart points, and they were making these ritual items that are deposited within the offerings of the pyramids.
[00:46:01.48] So it's a very specialized production where the folks down in Tlajinga were just making basic household subsistence things, like these blades that you would use in your kitchen. Some points also, but probably more for hunting, or maybe they had a small military contribution to the state. But so what would be the organization? How would the domestic and commercial economy connect with the political economy or institutional economy?
[00:46:27.03] Well, this pattern best matches what we know from the Mexica Aztecs of something called coatequitl And that is the labor tax that you gave on behalf of the state, done either next to a temple or next to a palace, that would happen on a rotating basis. So say every five, 10, 20 days, obsidian workers likely came to the Moon Pyramid and contributed their work tax in making things for the state. So that's how you connect the households to the wider political economy.
[00:46:57.71] Another apartment compound that we excavated just to the north of there, we can't really tell if they had a specialized trade. There are a lot of these plaster smoothers things that you see to the left, so they might have been involved in construction in some way. But we mostly excavated the patio, so this was a ritual space. And one of the incredible things we found was one of these stone masks.
[00:47:18.72] So people previously sort of thought these are mortuary masks that are only used for the elite. But here, we're finding them all the way out on the urban periphery, and it's telling us something about the economy of the city as a whole, that folks living-- just making utilitarian tools out on an outer borough of the city had access to some nicer things like these stone sculpted faces, some polychrome pottery, some long-distance imports.
[00:47:46.67] So filling in this picture then, we have folks with nice stuff like a mask. We have people making utilitarian goods like pottery and obsidian. And then down over here in the south, you can see that these structures are elevated on a platform.
[00:48:02.48] And we've now turned our attention here, as this is the neighborhood center. This is the public space for this particular district of the city. And we started excavating there in 2019. And first, we started finding things that were very different from the apartments.
[00:48:17.45] So first of all, they're elevated up on these platforms, and the construction has nice plaster coating, the buildings-- whoops, I did the wrong one here-- plaster-coated buildings with mural paintings on this. We don't see anything like that in the apartment, so these are special purpose buildings.
[00:48:37.21] They also have ritual deposits. So this is that old god of fire that you saw earlier from the formative period. This is the Teotihuacan incarnation for doing rituals in this patio. And you also have things like spondylus shell and iron ore beads that were coming from great distances.
[00:48:54.04] The murals are particularly informative, as they're conveying images relating to a few different themes. In one building, we have those relating to some sort of possible warriors, knives, some obsidian dart points over here, and then birds, bees, butterflies that are depictions of this paradise, this flowery afterworld that to the Aztecs, warriors who died in battle and women who died in childbirth would go to. So this was like a special place, a special afterworld. And so that's being conveyed through the imagery that was in this particular building in the neighborhood center.
[00:49:34.63] We also see these long-distance contacts. So the people of Tlajinga were connected to the wider Mesoamerican world, and they had access to some pretty nice stuff, especially seen in their neighborhood center. So mica, this particular mineral, comes from Oaxaca. And we know that they got the mica, but they also got pottery from that region, Zapotec pottery. We have stuff coming from West Mexico. So we have Michoacán-style figurines and spondylus shell from the Gulf.
[00:50:00.80] And in one of the really most amazing finds-- it would be maybe too strong because it's a single pottery sherd-- but informative in some way is this little piece of a sherd of a pottery vessel. There is a more complete one that has been discovered by Nawa and Saburo Sugiyama in a palace complex called Plaza of the Columns. Here at Tlajinga, we just have a little piece.
[00:50:27.29] But what is so great about it is it has this s of Teotihuacan and Maya attributes. So you see a person over here speaking in a Teotihuacan style with a speech volute. That's a very standard thing in Teotihuacan art, not in Maya art.
[00:50:44.20] But then down here, you have part of a Maya hieroglyph. I wish we had more of this, because it could have been like the Rosetta Stone of connecting the Maya hieroglyphic writing system to the Teotihuacan, whatever that person was speaking. But maybe one day, we'll find more of it. So connections to distant lands, for sure.
[00:51:03.96] Just recently, two summers ago we were able to go and excavate one of these platform complexes. And just like that image I showed you where we could go down and get a whole construction sequence, we were able to do that here, now with my new toy, the iPad, that's doing this sort of photogrammetry stuff. [LAUGHS] And so that allows you to see these buried buildings. I hope it's not making you too carsick. But--
[00:51:25.65] [LAUGHTER]
[00:51:26.55] --we have this earlier occupation phase and then building up to this platform in this later occupation phase. So here for a still image of that, we have buildings down here dating to around 300 or so. And there is something that looks very domestic that has burials next to it, which is a hallmark of domestic contexts, but something that does not look domestic. It looks like maybe a temple. It has some mural painting on it or some other special purpose building.
[00:51:57.44] Maybe about 50 to 70 years later, all of that was covered over with a platform of a meter and a half high, and new buildings were made on top that were totally decked out in these sorts of murals and sculpture. So we see this transformation from this earlier, simpler, mixed domestic, and maybe civic or temple complex shifting to this grand complex that we see later.
[00:52:21.27] And these platform complexes-- now remember, going back to the formative, that's a way of claiming distinction in your building, is making this big platform. And it turns out I've excavated a few of these, probably more than apartments along the city. So we have one next to the Moon Pyramid over here in the north of the city. We have one at Plaza of the Columns. And we have them all the way in the south at Tlajinga.
[00:52:45.34] And so it's telling us something about the administration of the city, the urban administration, I think the folks who both lived here and also had temple-type civic activities at these particular platform complexes. And just again, looking at labor estimates, we could see that they would take a lot more time to build this sort of platform complex with the sculpture and the lime plaster and the murals than the sorts of apartments that we have at Tlajinga.
[00:53:12.70] So we then can reconstruct what Tlajinga would have looked like within the wider urban fabric of Teotihuacan. And this is done by an artist I collaborate with, Rafael Mena. And we worked together to make this depiction that shows the simpler apartments that didn't have so much lime covering and murals, but then this neighborhood center that really could be in the center of the city, that tethered the administration and ritual life of this large district to the rest of the city.
[00:53:45.34] And so that seems to be one of the keys of Teotihuacan. They figured out a housing crisis, perhaps. They figured out how to make infrastructure and bring it out to the periphery of the city, and that kept it going for another few centuries. It did eventually decline, though, and that would be a whole other talk to just talk about the decline of the city. But just a few points.
[00:54:08.20] We see that central buildings-- the pyramids, the palace-- were systematically burned. People were adding fuel to the fire to burn those buildings. That does not happen out where we are in Tlajinga. There was no sort of raiding force coming from the outside in to attack the city. The city was systematically terminated, possibly by the very Teotihuacanos.
[00:54:29.96] There was acts of iconoclasm, of destroying monuments like the Xalla compound where Bill worked with Linda Manzanilla and Leonardo Lopez. That's a palace complex. And then where we work out to the East in Tlaxcala, we see this constricting of these trade corridors that Teotihuacan once controlled. So this is in the Teotihuacan phase. These sites over here are in the center of this strategic trade corridor. They go away in the next phase and everyone flees up to the hills, which suggests some sort of conflict happening in this particular period.
[00:55:05.53] So after that, Teotihuacan is no more as a large place, but it lives on today. So it lived on certainly for Aztec peoples. In fact, here's a little population graph of the Teotihuacan Valley. You can see probably about 70% of the population of the classic city eventually lived there in Aztec times. It was a center of creation, again, where the fifth sun, the current era of creation, was created. And it's a place that millions of people come to today, and is the backdrop for Mexican national pride and identity as a place today.
[00:55:42.98] So I hope that this sojourn down south to Teotihuacan has given you a better understanding of who these people were, how they fit with the broader Mesoamerican world, what their life was like, and this fascinating form of living that they developed for about three centuries where everyone is living in these apartments. This really was a city of apartments. And in some ways, I think that we can learn from the Teotihuacanos today. So thank you very much.
[00:56:08.53] [APPLAUSE]