The Real Origins of Teotihuacan?

Can we talk about Teotihuacan? There's still lots of mysteries about Teotihuacan, but chronology isn't one of them. It started around 2,000 years ago and was built by people from Mesoamerica. It's one of the most extensively excavated sites in all of Mexico, going back into the 1800s. A logical reason for that, beyond it being in amazing ruins, is its proximity to Mexico City. It's less than 50 kilometers to the northeast of the city. Archaeological teams can day trip out there from the city and have been doing so for well over a hundred years. And it's not just Teotihuacan. The whole valley of Mexico is very accessible to archaeologists. Despite thousands of carbon-14 and archaeomagnetic dates from the city, the internet continues to suggest that some much more ancient civilization built Teotihuacan, perhaps one not from the Americas. So, in this video, we'll take a deep dive into Teotihuacan's origins and chronology. We'll talk about the times before, how Teotihuacan started, how it grew to dominate much of Mesoamerica, and the evolving story of its demise. Teotihuacan didn't appear out of nowhere. It's part of a well-documented evolution of urbanism in central Mexico. That began with small permanent villages around 2000 BCE and eventually turned into massive cities like Teotihuacan. Of course, humans were there for thousands of years before. Perhaps tens of thousands of years. But they were living very differently. They were hunter-gatherers moving in seasonal rounds throughout the year. Across the Americas, we break that time period up into two major phases – Paleoindian and Archaic. I've been waiting for Paleoindian to be updated to some more politically correct term. But it hasn't happened yet. We have the end of the Paleoindian period pretty well understood. It's paired with the extinction of the megafauna – a process which completed about 10,000 years ago. Hunters had to change their strategies to hunt smaller animals, and they had to increasingly rely on gathering food plants. Now, our understanding of the start of the Paleoindian period is changing a lot these days. It's tied to the first humans in the Americas. It used to cap out at maybe 14,000 years ago. But now, in large part thanks to DNA studies, we're pushing it to 20, maybe even 30,000 years ago. But that was long before Teotihuacan. The Archaic period begins roughly 8,000 BCE. In Mexico, it begins with purely hunting and gathering. Slowly, they learn to farm things like corn, beans, squash, and other crops. That leads to sedentary life. People start living in the same place all year long to tend their crops. Around 1800 BCE, ceramics begin in Mexico. Actually, they learn to make them from people in southern Guatemala, who probably learned from people in South America. But however they got there, ceramics coincide with an increase in the number and size of permanent settlements. Over the next few centuries, we see four major hotspots of growth. The Olmec region, the Maya region, the Zapotec region, and the Valley of Mexico. Teotihuacan develops as part of that Valley of Mexico group. Really picking up speed around 1200 BCE, all four regions start building the earliest urban centers. Big communities of people living very closely together and with socioeconomic diversity. In the Valley of Mexico, the Tlatelco civilization was the first to develop. We know it best from its type sites Tlatelco, just northwest of Mexico City, and Tlapacoya, along the southern shore of Lake Chalco. Both were salvage projects and not visible today, but they produced hundreds of burials and thousands of ceramics. They were trading with the Olmecs, but clearly a separate culture group. After 1000 BCE, more and more communities of farmers filled the Valley of Mexico, and they began to build public architecture. Things like plazas and temples. They likely got those ideas from their trade partners in the Olmec world in Oaxaca. Those guys had been doing it for centuries. The biggest of those new cities was Coahuilco, built on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco. Starting about 800 BCE, they built temples and established vast tracts of agricultural lands in their fertile volcanic soils. By 200 BCE, Coahuilco had grown to a community of 20,000 people. And all around them, the villages and regional population was growing fast too. The Valley of Mexico became a thriving network of trade communities. It was just then, around 100 BCE, that Teotihuacan began. At the start, it was a small cluster of villages in the Teotihuacan Valley. But those then coalesced into one single community. They began to rival Coahuilco as the biggest community in the region. About 100 CE, when Teotihuacan's population reached 20,000, they did something on a scale Mesoamerica had never seen. Built the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The Pyramid of the Sun was built in a single phase around 100 CE. The Pyramid of the Moon was expanded over and over. Seven phases of construction from 100 to about 350 CE. The Avenue of the Dead and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl were also built during that time period. Collectively, it was the largest ceremonial center ever built in Mesoamerica. The dating of those constructions is very solid, based on thousands of carbon-14 and archaeomagnetic dating samples. And those were taken over decades. A big question that still remains is, who built Teotihuacan? Part of that question was just recently answered. A 2024 DNA study found that the burials of Teotihuacan were all people of Central Mexican genotypes, predominantly types A2, B2, and D1. So, it wasn't some foreign population. It was built by homegrown Mesoamericans. But still, we might ask, where did they get the inspiration from? The traditional answer was Coahuilco. But nowadays, there's doubt about that. An eruption of Volcano Xitle definitely covered Coahuilco with ash and then meters of lava. Forcing its inhabitants to flee. The big change is our understanding of when that eruption took place. We used to think it was around 100 CE, which would neatly explain Teotihuacan's population surge just as they started building pyramids. In that scenario, refugees from Coahuilco built the city. But reanalysis says that the eruption occurred more like 300 CE. That would mean that Teotihuacan's pyramids were already built by the time Coahuilco was destroyed. A population dump from Coahuilco is still possible, but after the pyramids were built. My brain doesn't exactly have an off switch. If you listen to this show, yours probably doesn't either. Good sleep is how you keep that engine running. And the mattress you're on makes more difference than most people realize. Our sponsor Ghostbed is here to help. They're a family owned company with more than 20 years manufacturing experience. And their mattresses are priced up to 50% less than comparable brands. Not because they cut corners, but because they put the money into the mattress instead of the markup. Every Ghostbed mattress is built with cooling materials and their ProCore support layer, which reinforces the center of the mattress where your body puts the most weight. And they've got more than 100,000 positive reviews from people who made the switch and didn't look back. Their mattresses are made in the USA and Canada and come with a 101 night sleep trial. Enough time to know if it's actually working for you. They offer fast free shipping and a warranty up to 25 years. Not sure which model is right for you? Take their mattress quiz at ghostbed.com slash barnhart for a personalized recommendation or reach out to their sleep experts directly via phone, email, or live chat on their website. Right now at Ghostbed, their summer sale takes $200 off mattress bundles, plus an extra 10% from my listeners with code barnhart. Go to ghostbed.com slash barnhart and use promo code barnhart at checkout. That's ghostbed.com slash barnhart, promo code barnhart. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. The other muddled evidence is the fact that Kwikwilko's Great Pyramid is circular, not square based like the sun and the moon. It's also, it was big, but not as big as those. It was 25 meters tall and 135 meters in diameter. And that's impressive, but unlikely the model for the Pyramid of the Sun. The other big pyramid builder in the area, who never gets enough attention or credit, was Cholula. It starts building its Great Pyramid at 200 BCE. It's a tiny thing at that point, but rectangular, not circular like the one at Kwikwilko. Its larger phases begin at 200 CE, so contemporary with Teotihuacan's building phases. By 350, with its third phase, it's larger than the Pyramid of the Moon. By 600, it's larger than the Pyramid of the Sun. That chronology parallels Teotihuacan, but it lags just slightly behind. It works great for demonstrating that Teotihuacan was not an isolated phenomena, but Cholula misses the chronology mark for being its inspiration. So what did inspire the people of Teotihuacan to build their massive pyramids? We might really never know. But to me, just off the top of my head, I think it could have been just a paradigm-shifting first of its kind. Everything has to start somewhere, right? And chronologically, it's the first of its kind. So, moving forward from the initial phases of Teotihuacan, after when they built all their big pyramids, the city makes another amazing shift. It stops building pyramids and starts building apartment compounds. Over the next 200 years, they build hundreds of big apartment complexes, walled compounds with dozens of rooms capable of housing hundreds of people each. The city's population surges to over 100,000 people. Built off the initial Avenue of the Dead, a gridded network of roads is established, connecting all the compounds to the massive markets in the middle of the city. What changed? The evacuation of Coahuilco, now reset around 300 CE, might have been part of it. But the population surge was greater than Coahuilco's entire population. It must have been a place that drew people from all over Mesoamerica. The neighborhoods of that new Teotihuacan proved that out. Maya, Zapotec, and Totonac communities have been found within the urban sprawl of the city. It became Mesoamerica's first truly metropolitan city. At the same time, starting around 300, Teotihuacan began spreading its influence outward. The iconography associated with it is often militaristic, but the evidence of actual military conquest is lacking. Their influence is instead manifested by architectural changes and luxury goods found in the graves of elites. Teotihuacan had a particular kind of architecture called telud-tablero. We see it first spread to the other cities in central Mexico, like Cholula, and then much wider. We see it at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, the Teotitlan structures in western Mexico, and up into northern Mexico as far as Zacatecas. By the mid-300s, Teotihuacan's influence is also strongly seen across the Maya world. Caminalhuyú in the Guatemalan Highlands gets an entire section of its city covered in telud-tablero. In the Maya lowlands, Teotihuacan roots itself into the royalty of Tikal. In 378 CE, the Tikal king is replaced with a prince from Teotihuacan named Yash-ayn, meaning first crocodile. The hieroglyphs state that he's the son of Spear-thrower Al, the ruler of Teotihuacan. The Maya call Teotihuacan Puh, which means place of reeds. It's clear that Teotihuacan had a strong, perhaps controlling relationship with Tikal. And just recently, we learned that that relationship began not in 378 but a hundred years earlier in the mid-200s. My friend and colleague Edwin Roman has been excavations at Tikal that reveal a never-before-known section of Teotihuacan architecture and artifacts. Stay tuned for our understanding of the Tikal-Teotihuacan relationship to change again. Economically, Mesoamerica thrived under the leadership of Teotihuacan. It seemed less of a military expansion and more like a vast trade network. So, when did Teotihuacan end? Most studies conclude 650 CE, but the specifics of their decline has changed in recent years. The old story was some kind of attack or internal rebellion burned the civic buildings along the Avenue of the Dead at 650 CE. That neatly correlated to the Mesoamerica-wide societal collapse that started happening in the 700s. But further studies refined that burning episode's date to more like 550 CE. And instead of being totally abandoned then, the city's population shrunk to only 40,000 people. But it was still functional. Then in 2022, an even deeper study of the burning episodes discovered that they had happened multiple times, the earliest being 327 CE. Now the story of Teotihuacan's fiery and sudden demise no longer holds water. What were those repeated burning episodes about? The 2022 study suggested that perhaps it was an early version of the Aztec New Fire Ceremony, during which old temples are burned and new ones are erected. I like that idea. Whatever they were, they were not the evidence of Teotihuacan's demise. Decline, perhaps, but not demise. That still came around 650 CE, and it's still believed to be the catalyst for the huge upheaval and abandonment of cities across Mesoamerica. The fall of Teotihuacan left a massive power vacuum in Mesoamerica. It took about a century for new kingdoms and cities to emerge. In central Mexico, they were independent, militaristic city states. Cities like Xochicalco, Cacashla, and El Tajin rose to power. Cholula abandons its pyramid, but survives into this next time period. The most important city of the day, living from 650 CE to about 1200 CE, was Tula. Northwest of modern Mexico City, it was the capital of the famed Toltecs. The Aztecs revered the Toltecs as the source of their great skill in diplomacy and the arts. All those cities lived and died within what we call the Terminal Classic period. But by 1200, they too were abandoned. In their place, big city-states were built along the shores of Lake Texcoco. Dozens of city-states, altepetos in their language, once again thrived in the Valley of Mexico's volcanic soil. Enter the Aztecs. According to them, they migrated into the Valley of Mexico from the northern desert somewhere around 1300. Starting as mercenaries working for bigger kingdoms, they eventually took over the entire valley. They established their capital of Tenochtitlan in 1425 and formed the Triple Alliance shortly afterwards. That unified the entire Valley of Mexico under one banner and set the stage for their greater expansion. And that was going swimmingly until the Spanish arrived in 1519. It was the Aztecs who told the Spanish that the name of the ruins, abandoned eight centuries earlier, was Teotihuacan, the city where the gods were born. They showed the Spanish chroniclers the ruins and collections of artifacts that they had excavated from there in a museum in Tenochtitlan's central precinct. Yes, if the chronicles aren't lying, there were Aztec archaeologists who dug at Teotihuacan, brought big stone statues home, and built a museum to showcase their finds. Now, the first modern archaeologists didn't believe that it was a city that the gods had built. For a long time, they thought it was built by the Toltecs. After all, the Aztecs talked about them like they were an ancient super-race. But in the 1940s, Tula was found, and Teotihuacan was confirmed to be centuries earlier. The exhaustive surveys of René Millon in 1973 and Bill Sanders in 1979 solidified Teotihuacan's chronology as I outlined it earlier, running from 100 BCE to 650 CE. It's interesting to contemplate that without archaeology, we'd be relying on the Aztec accounts of what Teotihuacan was and who built it. It's a well-known fact that the Aztecs rewrote their own history to place themselves in a more favorable, even divine, light. Archaeology has the ability to correct the false or just incorrect narratives that historians often write, not just in Mesoamerica, but across the world. Archaeology can challenge those histories written by the Archaeology can also challenge modern falsehoods, like the ones currently flooding the internet for clicks. I'm not going to lie, I think it's cool that archaeologists can be a threat to authorities and charlatans alike who seek to promote a skewed view of history. Hello fans! Would you like to support my work but don't want to be part of my Patreon? Then how about some fun merch? My YouTube doesn't have a good logo yet, but my podcast does. You could get a cool t-shirt like this. They come in every color and sweatshirts. Or you could get a snazzy mug like this. I've also got hats. You can find all this merch on my podcast's website at archaeoed.com support. While you're at it, give my podcast a listen. Of course, the easiest way you can support me is to hit the subscribe button. It costs you nothing, but it helps convince YouTube to push my content to a wider audience. But whatever you choose to do, thanks for watching!