It is important to note that most of these names are names the Aztecs gave to the buildings and the road, and are not necessarily representative of what the buildings were or what they were dedicated to. The original names of the buildings were lost along with the language used in Teotihuacan.
The people lived together in apartment complexes throughout the city. These living quarters are unique not only in Mesoamerica but also the world: Most apartments in historical cities were cramped tenement buildings, but these were spacious and beautiful.
The apartment complexes were bigger than some Mesoamerican palaces and had murals and small temples inside of them. Based off of the living quarters, Teotihuacan likely had a more egalitarian society, with most people falling into what would be considered a middle class in the modern day.
Offerings and sacrifices were left in public temples, presumably so that the public could participate as well in these gifts to the gods. Many of these elements were unique to Teotihuacan in the region, at least for almost a thousand years. Compared to most other Mesoamerican cities, at the time following it, Teotihuacan was unique both socially and architecturally. It did not follow the template most Mesoamerican cities used at the time.
Specifically, it did not resemble Tula, an ancient capital so uniform in its use of the ancient Mesoamerican planning principles that many other cities copied Tula when being created. Tenochtitlan was a city of great wealth, obtained through the spoils of tribute from conquered regions. Of astounding beauty and impressive scale, its towering pyramids were painted in bright red and blue, and its palaces in dazzling white.
Colorful, busy markets with a bewildering array of foods and luxuries impressed native visitors and conquering Spaniards alike. Most of the construction in Tenochtitlan took place during the reigns of four Aztec kings beginning in the s.
Built largely upon land reclaimed from Lake Texcoco, the city was laid out on a grid, inspired by the still visible ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan of a thousand years earlier. Its network of streets and canals teemed with canoes that transported people and goods within the city and across the lake to towns on the shore, to which it was linked by three raised causeways.
Two aqueducts supplied fresh water. At the heart of Tenochtitlan was the Sacred Precinct, the religious and ceremonial center not just of the city, but of the empire as well. Surrounded by a masonry wall of serpents, this enclave of about by yards could hold more than 8, people within its precincts. One map from shortly after the Spanish conquest shows the ruined pyramids of Teotihuacan as markers.
Other information is archaeological, including the results of survey and excavations of Aztec period sites in the Teotihuacan Valley. Aztec occupation around Teotihuacan is recognized by the distinctive orange and red ceramics that are very different from the Classic-period ceramics of Teotihuacan. These collections have been used by my research team and by other scholars.
They cannot be replaced, both in the literal sense that archaeology, as a practice, culls a unique material record, and also in a larger sense: land development has destroyed other sites of this type in the Teotihuacan Valley.
The Teotihuacan Laboratory is vital to our continued understanding of the city of Teotihuacan and its surrounding region, and Arizona State University is to be commended for its indispensable role in maintaining so many irreplaceable archaeological collections and providing space for their study.
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