Teotihuacan

In 2003 a heavy rainstorm opened a hole in the ground in front of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The hole dropped into a tunnel that ran about a hundred metres under the temple, eighteen metres below the surface, and had been deliberately sealed shut some eighteen centuries earlier.

It was too narrow and too unstable to walk into, so remote-controlled robots went first. What they found was strange even by the standards of the site. Tens of thousands of objects: sea shells from both coasts, rubber balls, amber, carved stone. Small pools of liquid mercury on the floor. And the walls and ceiling had been coated with powdered pyrite and similar minerals, so that under a torch the whole passage glitters like a night sky. Near the far end, someone had modelled a miniature landscape with mercury standing in it like lakes.

Somebody built an underworld eighteen metres down, then closed the door. Who it was for, and whether anyone is buried in there, is still being argued about.

A City With No Faces

The Aztecs did not build this place. By the time they reached the valley the pyramids had stood empty for centuries, the terraces were under soil and the great avenue was overgrown. They came anyway. They walked out to the ruins regularly, dug into them, left offerings among the stones, and their rulers made pilgrimages here. The most powerful state in central Mexico was paying its respects to a city whose builders it could not name.

The name we use is theirs, not the builders'. Teotihuacan is Nahuatl, usually glossed as something like the place where the gods were made. What the people who actually laid out the city called themselves, and what language they spoke, is unknown. There is no king list, no dynastic record, no deciphered script.

The absence goes further than that. In Maya cities, rulers are everywhere: portraits, names, accession dates carved on stone. At Teotihuacan there is nothing of the kind. No statue of a ruler, no securely identified royal tomb, no personal victory scene. The murals show gods, processions and interchangeable figures rather than individuals. Some researchers read this as evidence that the city was run collectively, by several noble houses or a council, rather than by one man.

Ordinary life was unusual too. More than two thousand walled, single-storey compounds housed multiple families each around shared courtyards. One neighbourhood buried its dead in the manner of Oaxaca; another is thick with pottery from the Gulf coast and the Maya lowlands. The city had foreign quarters.

Reach

Teotihuacan's influence did not stay in its valley. A Maya inscription records that in the year 378 a man named Siyaj K'ak' arrived at Tikal, and that Tikal's king died on that same day. A dynasty with Teotihuacan connections took over afterwards. That is more than a thousand kilometres away, dated to the day.

The Fire

Somewhere around the middle of the sixth century the ceremonial core burned. The interesting part is where the fire went. It was not indiscriminate: burning concentrates on the temples and elite structures lining the Avenue of the Dead, and largely spares the ordinary residential compounds. That pattern reads less like an invading army and more like an uprising from inside.

People kept living here afterwards, but the city never returned to anything like its former scale. The population stayed; the power left.

A Hundred-Year-Old Mistake

Before you look at a photograph of the Pyramid of the Sun, one warning: the stepped profile you see is not entirely original. During a major restoration campaign at the start of the twentieth century, a large amount of the pyramid's outer facing was stripped away and the structure was rebuilt with an extra terrace that had not been there. One of the most recognisable silhouettes on earth carries a century-old error in it.

Now

The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987 and is the most visited archaeological place in Mexico. The pressure comes from its edges. Land right on the protection boundary has repeatedly attracted illegal building, and in 2021 heavy machinery clearing ground inside the buffer zone brought work to a halt while authorities intervened. Climbing the two great pyramids is no longer permitted, because several million pairs of feet a year turned out to be a serious erosion problem.

What has not changed is the basic situation. A city of well over a hundred thousand people was built, run for centuries and burned, and we still do not know what its inhabitants called themselves.