Teotihuacan: the city whose builders we cannot name

Teotihuacan covered around twenty square kilometres and housed perhaps 125,000 people at its height, in the first centuries AD. It was one of the largest cities on earth at the time. It had apartment compounds, workshops, drainage, and a monumental axis nearly four kilometres long.

And we do not know who built it. Not in the way we know about Rome or Egypt — we do not have their name for themselves, their language, or a king list.

What is documented

The archaeology, in enormous detail. The Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, the Avenue of the Dead, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Residential compounds housing extended households, many with painted murals.

Occupation from around 100 BC, monumental construction through the first two centuries AD, a peak around AD 400, and a violent collapse in the sixth or seventh century in which the ceremonial centre was burned.

Trade goods from across Mesoamerica. Evidence of a multi-ethnic population, with distinct Zapotec and Maya neighbourhoods identifiable from ceramics and burial practice.

Why we know so little about the people

They left almost no readable writing. Teotihuacan has signs and symbols, some of which may be a script, but nothing has been deciphered and there is no bilingual text to work from.

That is the whole of it. Contemporary Maya cities left inscriptions naming rulers and recording dates, so we know Maya dynastic history in detail. Teotihuacan, a larger and arguably more influential city, is archaeologically rich and historically silent.

What is genuinely strange

The absence of rulers. There are no royal portraits, no named kings, no obvious dynastic tombs of the kind found everywhere else in Mesoamerica.

The art is overwhelmingly corporate — deities, processions, abstract motifs — rather than individual. Some archaeologists argue for collective or council rule; others think royal burials exist and have not been found.

For a city of that size and duration, the lack of a single identifiable ruler is a real anomaly and it is an anomaly within archaeology, not outside it.

The apartment compounds

The part of Teotihuacan that has changed archaeology most is not the pyramids. It is the housing.

Over two thousand walled residential compounds have been identified. Each held an extended household or several — a set of rooms around open courtyards, with drainage, plastered floors and, in many cases, painted murals. People were buried beneath the floors of the rooms they had lived in.

Nothing else in the ancient Americas looks like this. It is planned urban housing on a grid, built to a standard, occupied for generations. Whoever ran the city was housing a large population deliberately rather than letting it accrete.

What excavation keeps producing

Tunnels. A passage beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, sealed for over eighteen centuries and rediscovered in 2003, was excavated over the following years and contained thousands of offerings — including metallic spheres, jaguar remains, worked shell and liquid mercury.

The mercury attracts attention. Its likeliest purpose is symbolic, representing water or the underworld, and mercury has been found at other Mesoamerican sites in ritual contexts.

Sacrificial burials at the Feathered Serpent pyramid, with the hands bound, are also documented — over a hundred individuals, apparently dedicatory.