The Ancients - Ancient Americas: Teotihuacan

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

A jewel of Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan was a vibrant, painted city - but who built it? And who actually lived there?In the second episode of our August series 'The Ancient Americas', Tristan is joined by professor Annabeth Headrick to help shine a light on one of ancient history's most marvellous mysteries. Taking us on a journey through the city, examining the monumental structures, the mythology it was built on, and a quick detour to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent - there is no doubt Teotihuacan is a treasure trove of information.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, we're continuing our Ancient Americas series this August, and today we've got a hell of a good one because we're still in Mesoamerica but we're talking about one of Mesoamerica's greatest, biggest, ancient settlements. The site of Teotihuacan. You'll notice in this podcast that I struggle sometimes a bit with the pronunciation of the word, but don't let

that take anything away from this ancient city. Contemporary with Republican Rome, with Imperial Rome, it was a massive monumental city in Mesoamerica, filled with temples, pyramids, great courtyards, rich in in art in paint, in decoration and also the amount of archaeology that has survived and is still being uncovered is revealing so much more about this culture this Mesoamerican culture

that lived at Te Atihuacan and to explain all about this 40 minutes, an overview of this city, of this ancient settlement, I was delighted for us to get on the podcast, Professor Annabeth Hedrick from the University of Denver. Now, Te Tehuacan, it's such a big topic, we can't cover everything in 40 minutes, but this is a great overview at a few different aspects of it. We look at the layout of the settlement, we look at a few monumental

buildings such as the pyramids of the sun of the moon and the temple of the feathered serpent and we also look at what the arts, what the archaeology is revealing about the military, how the military worked in this ancient society. Annabeth explains all, she was so enthusiastic, an absolutely great speaker and I know you're going to absolutely love this one. So without further ado to continue our ancient America's series here's Annabeth. Annabeth it's great to have you on the podcast today. Well thank you so much it's lovely to talk about something I care about so much. I mean, and absolutely, this is quite something to care a lot about. Teotihuacan, I may have got the pronunciation completely wrong,

but Annabeth, just the size and the scale of this site, it has to surely rank amongst the largest, the biggest ancient sites in Mesoamerica. Yeah, I think not until the Aztec came later on was it the number of population was not until the Aztec came later on was it the number of population was larger by the Aztec. But I mean, maybe 100,000, 120,000 people lived there, which is massive. And for pre-industrial cities, it's one of the largest there was. Size-wise, at some points, it was much larger than the city of Rome. I'm not going to say the

empire of Rome, but the city of Rome. So I don't know that people realize that the New World, you know, we had these massive places. And what we're learning too is it's not only the physical size of it, but Teotihuacan had its fingers all over Mesoamerica. It impacted places very outside of its own region. So it was massive that way. And it's really, I'm glad that you pointed out how this is contemporary with imperial Rome

in the size and the scale of it. That's great to highlight straight away. And Teotihuacan, let's get the basics sorted first of all. Whereabouts in Mesoamerica is Teotihuacan? So it's a little northeast of Mexico City. On a good day with traffic, it's about an hour. And so if anybody's visiting Mexico City, it's really worth it to take one or two days out at Teotihuacan

because it knocks your socks off. And in fact, when you drive up the highway from Mexico City, it's not even called Teotihuacan. It's just called the pyramids. It's so famous and it's such the national site that that's how they refer to it. It's the national place for Mexico City, even though maybe the Maya are more famous among people in the United States and Europe. It's Teotihuacan, it's the heart and soul of Mexico. And you mentioned names like Maya and Aztec there,

so it leads on to the next big question. Do we know who built Teotihuacan? Wouldn't that be nice? I always tell my students, we really don't know the language of Teotihuacan. Some people wonder if it's an early version of Nahuatl, which is the language of the Aztec. But that really hasn't been securely determined. There is writing at Teotihuacan. People might read that there was no writing, but that's not true. It's just we don't totally

understand how to read it, and there's some beginnings of that, but not solid on there. So we call them Teotihuacanos because, you know, we name them the people there after their city. It was probably a very diverse number of people that lived there. The archaeologists are really revealing more and more how it was a place that a lot of people migrated to. So sometimes I like to think of it like New York City, where you have people from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Africa and all over the world people live at New York City. And I think

in some ways Teotihuacan was like that. So does it, as it therefore feels like a center, a city very much at the heart of this wider interconnected Mesoamerican world some 2000 years ago? Yeah, exactly. The reason we know that there are people from all over, for instance, there's a type of Gulf Coast house that is round, and so we find these round houses, and they are different than everybody else there. We find ceramics from other places at Teotihuacan, and we find writing from the Maya area that tells us that they were visiting Teotihuacan, and we find recently there was even right on the main avenue of Teotihuacan, they found that there were Maya elites living there. So very cosmopolitan. And do we therefore have any idea about the

origins of Teotihuacan? I know we're going far back, it's probably very murky, but do we have any idea about when this place was founded or when it became an important center? Right. So, or when it became an important center? Right. So, you know, about 100 to 50 BC is where a lot of people start looking at Teotihuacan. And it could be a little oversimplified, but it does appear that there were some other places that were bigger and larger before Teotihuacan, not larger at that time period, Teotihuacan much larger eclipsed them and got bigger than those. But there were some sites near, say, Mexico City and other places around in that part. We call that part Central Mexico, when we're up in that part of Mexico. And there was a lot of volcanic activity. And in one of these sites called Cuicuco actually literally got covered with volcanic flows. And it's not even like Pompeii. It's so

hard that, you know, the early archaeologists, not really great archaeology, but they used dynamite, you know, to get at this archaeology because it's so solid in there. And it may be that people were trying to get away from that kind of thing. Interestingly, Teotihuacan has a volcano there. These were still very sacred mountains, and they put themselves at the foot of this mountain, but it was a dormant volcano then and now. And there's even smaller little places. There's a wonderful little site called Titimpa that you can find architecture like what people lived in at Teotihuacan, pre-Teotihuacan. They too got covered by volcanic ash,

but they had little altars in the patios of their residential areas. And they had, one of them at least had a little miniature volcano, you could light a fire under the altar and smoke would come out. It was really quite adorable in some ways. So, you know, there was this relationship with the mountains because they bring fertility I mean that's why people still live on volcanoes because there's wonderful soil and it grows things but it comes at a cost but Teotihuacan also seems to be a place that trade routes go through there and in and out of there so they in some ways it might not have been the best place to settle. But it was very useful because they could get to other places and move goods and services all over

the place. So and that may be what attracted a bunch of people from there. And they slowly settled, continuing all the way to about 650 AD. So it lasted a very long time. I mean, absolutely, Annabeth. And it almost seems, therefore, like a combination of, you said, that natural volcanic disaster combined with its situation on the trade routes and the fertility of the soil, I'm guessing all kind of helped in the development,

in the growth of this particular city, of this centre, into one which is full of all this monumental architecture. And do we have any idea when this monumental architecture dates to, when a city like Teotihuacan reaches its zenith? Yeah. So, you know, we see some architecture starting to grow. And, you know, if you really think about around 250 a.d is when we really start to see massive building and they're starting to build the avenue of the dead

and such like that and in many ways i like to focus on the pyramid of the moon so if you think about teotihuacan it has an avenue that's we don't really some people call it the street of the moon. So if you think about Teotihuacan, it has an avenue that's, we don't really, some people call it the street of the dead, but I was encouraged by a mentor of mine to really think of it as an avenue because it is a grand avenue. It's impressive and it's built to impress people. It's like the Champs-Élysées, you know, it's supposed to draw you in and have that kind of visual effect. So it's a three mile long avenue. And at the end of it is the Pyramid of the Moon. But the Pyramid of the Moon is in line with a mountain nowadays called Cerro Gordo, which is not a nice name, it just means fat mountain. But we know from the Aztec who came a little later that they called it

something more akin to our mother. So in this origin mountain, this was filled with water and goodness and corn and all the things that one needed to live. And so they built the Pyramid of the Moon at the end of the avenue so that it's a human version of the mountain behind it. So it literally lines up visually with Cerro Gordo. And so the Pyramid of the Moon and Cerro Gordo are one in the same. What's interesting is some of the work that's been done, particularly by Ruben Cabrera and Saburo Sugiyama, is excavating inside the Pyramid of the Moon. And to me, what I find particularly interesting is they have some rather modest versions of that pyramid. We always say that Mesoamerica builds a little bit like

Russian nesting dolls. There's a little doll and then a bigger, bigger. And that's how pyramids are. A lot of times there's different little pyramids inside and they make them larger and larger. And the pyramid of the moon was kind of modest, you know, little platform thing. They weren't big stuff, but it really takes off. And what we see is a burial that includes a person that very much looks like he's a war captive. His body looks like he's gotten hit many times and the bones have healed and such. He has his hands tied behind his back. He may have been alive when he was put into this largest chamber. It's sort of a big, large box-like room type thing. And his hands are tied behind his back, and he's kind of slumped on the wall behind,

or on the side of the wall in that chamber. And around him are lots of things that reflect the military. A lot of dart points, they used some, their weapon of choice for warfare and hunting was an atlatl. It's a spear thrower. It makes a pretty deadly weapon in there. So we find lots of points from that. The wood, of course, is decayed and no longer there. But also deposits of different animals are placed in there. And these animals are more or less the mascots of the military. So what we see is unlike a Maya city where a king dies and then they build a pyramid over him, or the king's building the pyramid while he's alive, you know, like the Egyptians, and then his body's put in there. In this case, it's the military they're celebrating. At the very end of this wonderful long avenue they're celebrating how

important they were to the city it's very different every you know everybody that digs at tetuacan is like oh we're gonna find the king we're gonna find the king they don't i mean annabeth that's so interesting and we will delve into that military aspect because that is really really cool i mean i'd like to kind of let's keep a bit more on the the layout of tetuacan at the moment just to kick it off. So you've mentioned the Pyramid of the Moon. You mentioned the Avenue of the Dead. If you were walking down Teotihuacan in around 250 AD, around that time of all this monumental architecture,

what are some other key standout architectural features you would see alongside the Pyramid of the Moon? Right. So about a mile, mile and a half south of the Pyramid of the Moon? Right. So about a mile, mile and a half south of the Pyramid of the Moon, there's a very large enclosure that today is a parking lot. And we don't understand a lot about it because the archaeology, we didn't really understand how important it was, I think, in the past. But that seems to be, and there's a scholar, Matthew Robb, who argues that maybe that was an assembly point for big, huge parades, processions that would go down the avenue. But it was probably also a place where visitors would enter the city. And you come through this kind of huge, large courtyard into

an avenue that's literally walled by temples and palaces. I personally think of them as palaces. The temples are more private for the palaces themselves. And so you're almost like a horse with blinders on you. You have architecture on either side of you as you walk up this avenue. The avenue goes slowly uphill, but it's also almost like a series of locks when you're in a ship because there's these boxes and then you go up a series of stairs and then you go to a higher one and you go to a higher one. And so you're continually being drawn towards the Pyramid of the Moon. One analogy that I think of it is it's when you go into a medieval cathedral and there's that lighted apse behind the altar, how you feel compelled to walk towards it. The light just draws you forward. The Pyramid of the Moon draws you forward like that. Now as you were walking up that, about halfway is the Pyramid

of the Sun, which is actually bigger than the Pyramid of the Moon and very, very important. Now the Pyramid of the Moon, it's in the north and it faces south, but the Pyramid of the moon and very very important now the pyramid of the moon it's in the north and it faces south but the pyramid of the sun is over on your right and it faces to the west okay so it faces that way and it's a massive pyramid the first time i saw it i was at the end of an archaeological project i was riding around probably unsafely in the back of a pickup truck, you know, and it had one of those covers. And I was looking through a little window, and I looked out and I thought, oh, there's a mountain. And then I realized, no, that's a pyramid. And you have to understand, I'd seen a lot of pyramids before that, but they were Maya pyramids, and they're kind of tall and skinny. And I thought they were impressive. But when you see

the pyramid of the sun, your feet are not, your socks are knocked off. You're just blown away by how large it is. I didn't realize that Mesoamericans made pyramids that large. Interestingly, the Pyramid of the Sun is bigger, but because it's at a lower elevation, the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon are about the same height. The tops of them line up that way. And there's a lot of planning with that in that. And so you walk past that massive pyramid. Again, on either side were these private temples to probably different families, ancestors, and different gods. And then you reach the end of the avenue and there's this big, humongous courtyard that has altars in the center and a really interesting, strange, unique

building that's probably associated with calendrical rituals and then the Pyramid of the Moon. I forgot to mention one thing, sorry. But, you know know i mentioned that massive courtyard that you could assemble in and start as your walking point up there across from that is another area that we call the ciudadela now these names are usually just kind of silly names that are applied to things it means a citadel but whatever that is but it's a very large walled enclosure it has it's one of those where you could control access to, which tells you something about what its possible function was. And so it has this raised platform around it. It too had a number of temples on top of that platform. And one of my wishes is that we

knew what those temples were, but now we just have the bases and there's nothing for us to really tell. But I assume those were dedicated to different deities, but or I don't know what they were dedicated to, but it's they're intriguing. And you go up over the platform and down into an enclosed patio that has another pyramid that's called the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. And it's all decorated and sculpture and painting and it's got a huge amazing history to it so those are the three large pyramids you have the pyramid of the moon in the north the pyramid of the sun that's facing towards the setting sun but the sun rises behind it and then the temple of the feathered serpent further south well let's focus in on the

temple of the feathered serpent and actually also you mentioned it earlier that great plaza that cue de de la plaza is that what it what it's called it's that also that massive almost gathering meeting point to amidst all these pyramids so it's great to highlight that but let's focus in on the feathered serpent temple because this seems really a really significant in the story of Teotihuacan and more recent archaeological discoveries. Yeah, no, it's the pyramid that keeps on giving. It's just an amazing space and very much, you know, blown away by the superb archaeology of my colleagues. And the earliest one was Ruben Cabrera and Saburo Sugiyama that excavated, shall we say, the foundations of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. And then more recently, Sergio Gomez, a Mexican archaeologist, and his team, it's always a team, has done

incredible excavations of a cave underneath, a man-made cave underneath the temple of the feathered serpent. But I suppose we should start with the cave underneath because it's the earliest part. And what he's finding, stay tuned, because there was so much in there that it takes years for that kind of material to get published and out there. And so they have so much on their hands and we're going to have a wonderful party learning about all the things that they're finding in there. So essentially, from what I understand, the archaeologists noticed a depression

that was in the plaza of this large enclosure and started investigating. And what they realized is that the Teotihuacanos had built a man-made cave. There's a tunnel and a cave and you go straight down. And then it's wonderful. You go underneath, down, down, down, across the, through that. And this cave is basically underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. And so what we see in Mesoamerica is, in a lot of cultures in the world, is recognition of what we might call the three levels of the universe. You have the underworld,

we all experience that with lakes and caves and things like that. You have the human realm, what we live on. And then you have the celestial realm, which, you know, think about the top of the pyramids and such like that. So it gets you to recognize those three parts of the universe and the sky and such like that. So this cave underneath, as they dug through the cave, it appeared that lots and lots of deposits were placed by the Teotihuacanos over a period of time. But they also went in and took things out themselves.

So when we talk about looting, a lot of times we're talking about modern people that go and take things and sell them on the antiquities market, which of course we don't like very much at all. But these are Teotihuacanos themselves going in and removing things that were, they were looking for things in there. So we can see that this cave had been entered a couple of times in there. As they excavated, it was clear that at the very end, let's start at the end that's underneath the center of the pyramid, is a chamber that represents the underworld. And in fact, there's lines that indicate that there was water in there at one point. So if you imagine going through this cave and then getting to the end, there'd be this underwater magical pool of water down there. And

another thing that they discovered was that they took mud and mixed pyrite in with it, and they smeared that on the ceiling. So if you're with a torch, which is different than electricity because it flickers, all that pyrite would flicker and shimmer above you. So it's almost like the stars are up above you on top of that. And then you have this pool of water that's down there. Now, I think people hoped again that they would find a ruler there. But what they found was equally fascinating. They found part of a male figure, but also some female figures that are large, large greenstone figures. So maybe, gosh, I don't know, about a little less than a meter high. And what Serio argues, and I think he's absolutely right, because at some of these figures, they found concentrations of sacred objects, little wonderful, precious offerings. And what

he thinks is that these figures originally were wearing little backpacks. You know, in Mesoamerica, they would wear little netted backpacks and comparing that to the later Aztec. Now remember, the Aztec are 1000 years later. But there's a lot of continuity in Mesoamerica beliefs. We've had a lot of debates in my field about whether there's continuity or not. I'm certainly a believer in it. Just as though, you know, a figure named Christ has lasted for 2,000 years. In Mesoamerica, ideas and beliefs could last for 1,000 years too. And so we often use the later Aztec to understand things.

And the Aztec had these figures called Teomamas, which were godbearers. And they were the founders that settled communities. And they were the ones that carried the sacred objects. And when you decided to set up a city, you didn't just, you know, we might take a golden shovel and build a building or something. But there had to be a sacredness to it. It looks as though when you're going to settle a city, you had to have the sacred objects, you had to place those sacred objects and this ancestral foundation and also a deity type

foundation. And these figures may represent those original ancestors who settled Teotihuacan. And it's interesting that some of them are women. It shows you that I think that's something that I and a lot of people need to have a little more conversation with at Teotihuacan, that they were probably very critical in the ideology of Teotihuacan. And it's maybe something I haven't explored enough. And I've been ruminating on it since they were found. And they're at the end of that tunnel. And so these are these ancestral founders in this cave that are setting up the community of Teotihuacan and placing the sacred bundles there. Later on, they seem to have put different chambers. So think of a tunnel that has different walls that slowly filled up and they put lots and lots of offerings.

I haven't written about this, but my colleagues would know this is very predictable of me. But I do wonder if some of those ancestors were actually buried in those different chambers. And at later points, they were taken out. Now, that's negative evidence. We don't have those ancestral bones there and such. But I do wonder if there were actually ancestral remains that were there that later on people went and took them out. And so therefore, you kind of hinted at it there. I mean, if you have that underground layer there with the ancestors and you have those tall pyramids, too, reaching up to the sky and then the central area,

what does this therefore tell us about the layout, how the city was organized? What beliefs do you therefore think influenced the design, the urban structure of Teotihuacan? Well, a lot of that comes from the Pyramid of the Sun, which is in the middle one. It's further up the Avenue of the Dead. Now, certainly the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent was critical, but I think the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent was critical, but I think the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent is very much associated with political authority

and power. The Pyramid of the Sun is probably much more of a structure. I'm not saying it doesn't have political authority going on, but it seems to have this cosmological element. And essentially, when you're in climes like Mesoamerica, you have on the day of solstice and such, you have certain days where the sun doesn't show shadows and such like that. And essentially, there's a day when the sun rises and sets over the pyramid of the sun on the same point on the horizon line. So if you imagine a priest at the Pyramid of the Sun looking to the west, there's one day of the year where the sun would be on the same point where it sets on that day. And that seems to be roughly perpendicular with the Avenue of the Dead at that.

So this day where if you think about early people were not using telescopes and such, they were looking at the horizon to understand how the sun moved, how the earth moved and such. And so the sun actually moves along the horizon. That's why we get our long days and our short days and all of that. And so there's one day where the sun sets on that same point in those same days seems to be a marker at Teotihuacan. And then they oriented the Avenue of the Dead perpendicular to it. So we do have a gridded city. Everything seems to largely conform to that grid.

There's a few exceptions, but people, it seems to be a sacred meaning to them. And you wanted to fit in with that structure that the gods set up in the rhythm of fit in with that structure that the gods set up in the rhythm of the universe with that. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people? It's so fascinating isn't it that some of the three musketeers are also based on real soldiers. That Sir Walter Raleigh wasn't all that he's the three musketeers are also based on real soldiers that sir water raleigh wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be chemist poet scholar historian courtier he could have been great in all these different things and that if your name is dudley you better watch your back

for the tutors each one of them took something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family, or of course, by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and I'm learning all this and much more, bringing you Not Just the Tudors twice a week, every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And, well, I wish I could stay much on this, but we've got to keep moving on. But I have to also ask this other question. You mentioned it a couple of times, obviously, this temple, the feathered serpent. What exactly is the feathered serpent? What is the feathered serpent? That's the million dollar question. I thought about writing my dissertation on the feathered serpent, and then I realized I wanted to actually graduate.

So it's a huge question. So there's probably a couple of things. There is a mythical figure, and he's present at the beginning of time. The Maya story, it's called the Popol Vuh. At the very beginning of time when there was no land in the world, there was just water, there were two deities, and one of which was the feathered serpent, and he was swimming in this water. He's also a deity that at some point later on, you know, he goes in and he finds corn and he helps bring corn, which is the sustenance of Mesoamerica to people. But we also know from later time periods that certain rulers associated themselves with the feathered serpent. It was almost as though that was their identity and that there may have been individuals that were very much associated with a feathered serpent.

And in fact, above that cave at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, they found lots and lots and lots of burials, maybe over 200 burials of military people and some women. And at the center of that pyramid, there may have been the burial of a ruler who was identifying himself with the feathered serpent. So on the outside of the temple, you have the feathered serpent swimming in water. It seems to be that creation story. I'm sorry, I didn't get those quite together. But on the outside of the temple, you see the feathered serpent and he's swimming among strombus shells and conch shells. And also he has Spondylus shells, which were very, very sacred. They had red centers and they're importing them from other places. So he's swimming in the sacred waters all around in there

and certainly associated with fertility and water and such. But a lot of us do believe there was a burial of a ruler somewhere inside that temple. He identified with the temple with the feathered serpent, and it was an emblem of the feathered serpent that he identified with. The problem is we may have another situation where the Teotihuacanos themselves took him out. When they were excavating that temple, the archaeologists were digging and digging, and they hit a chamber, an open chamber. And what they realized is that at one point, Teotihuacanos had tunneled in.

And this is while the site's still going on. It's not abandoned or anything. It's the height of the site. They went in, they tunneled in, and took something out of the center of the pyramid. And a lot of us believe it may have been the remains of a very, very powerful, important ruler that was associated with the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. And that also means that all those over 200 people that were buried there were buried to go along with him and associated with him. So we've lost him, but he may have been there. And

it's a pretty remarkable kind of story to think about that. At some point, it may be that that guy was pretty abusive. They smashed the holy living heck out of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The backside and the two sides of it were smashed. Some of the sculpture was dragged away and repurposed in other places at Teotihuacan. And then they literally covered up the front of the temple. That's the part that's still intact. But what they did was they covered it all up and put a porch on top of it so you couldn't see it anymore. So at some point, what you saw was the remains of a smashed, destroyed temple and some kind of a new ideology. So whoever was

associated with the feathered serpent pyramid probably fell out of favor at one point. But it was a legend that continued. We know the cultures that came after Teotihuacan continued to talk about feathered serpents and feathered serpent pyramids and used that in their way of founding their cities. And it was legendary. Legendary indeed indeed and you mentioned earlier paints and you know paint and decoration yeah on the temple of the feathered serpent on that particular building so can we imagine some 2 000 years ago of all this monumental architecture there was teotihuacan was it a very colorful city oh my gosh yes so the one thing we haven't talked

about is of of course, first thing they seem to have really focused on was building the Avenue of the Dead. But after they built that and these massive pyramids, they really focused on the people and they built lots and lots of what we call apartment compounds, or maybe up to like 2000 of these apartment compounds. And Tantoo O'acanos lived in a very high standard of living. It's maybe a little bit like here in the United States. We tend to live at a higher standard living than lots of people in the world and probably to the rest of the people's detriment. But Teotihuacan was like that too. They had an extraordinary high standard of living. They

brought in a lot of wealth. They were engaged in trade all over their region. And so they built these wonderful, fabulous houses. I mean engaged in trade all over their region and so they built these wonderful fabulous houses. I mean in other places these would be considered palaces but it was a lot of the regular people were living in these. They're roughly rectangular or square and they often have structures in the middle of them where the most important family member, maybe the head of the lineage or the family, lived in that space. But then there's lots of other little rooms and we call them apartment compounds because they have little rooms like apartments and they're probably extended families, you know, large extended families are living in these. But what's neat about these is they have

paint all over them. They put lots and lots of plaster all over the walls and then they would paint on the plaster while it's wet just like a traditional fresco in the old world and people had these murals in their residential spaces and they are phenomenal and part of what brought me into studying the site. We do think that the Avenue of the Dead had painting all along it too, but a lot of that doesn't survive, and it's hard to know because the remains don't survive as well with that material. Interestingly, not everybody lived in quite the same quality. They did some excavations in one area called La Ventilla, and they found people that had these nice houses that were built out of stone, and they had plastered walls with painting houses that were built out of stone and they had

plastered walls with painting. And then some of the neighbors next door didn't quite have as much stone in their building. It was a little more mud or that way. And they actually plastered their walls with mud, but still painted them. So it's sort of the cheaper version of decorating your house. But still, there had to be a whole army of people that were dedicated to painting and decorating these houses the way that people wanted them done. It sounds like it would have been quite a profession indeed. As you say, a very popular one as well. I mean, do we know, are there any motifs, any themes that seem to come up again and again and again that are depicted on this artwork? Well, you know, to me, instead of being idiosyncratic about people liking things and such,

a lot of it does seem to talk about the state and the military and the politics of the city. There seems to be a lot of buy-in to the beliefs of the city with that. One patio that I spent a lot of time looking at, they tended to build their temples in threes. So you have your main temple in the center and it would be two smaller temples on the sides. And that's the Pyramid of the Sun is a big huge pyramid, but it has two small tiny temples in it and the reason they do that is that at the beginning of time the gods placed three stones of creation and those three stones of creation mark the center of the universe and that that's how they conceptualize the beginning of the world so downtown has those three stones and then everybody had these three temples

in their apartment compounds to represent that cosmology. But what's interesting about this one patio I worked on is the center one has what we legitimately think could be a portrait of the ruler. He's dressed with a bird in his headdress, and he has a staff that I've identified as probably a staff of a ruler in there. And then on the other two temples, we have people that are dressed up like bird warriors. They're all in bird costumes and they have weapons of war, the atlatls that I was talking about, the spear throwers. And on the other side, we have coyote warriors.

Well, I shouldn't call them coyotes because more now we're thinking a lot of these are wolf hybrids and such like that. So canines is a more neutral word to call them. So the canine warriors. And these are two groups of warriors that are some of many. There's other people that dressed up in snake costumes and a variety of different things. They sort of like mascots, like American football teams where you have the bears and the, I don't know, the Cowboys and

the Broncos. Ancient mascot. Yeah. Ancient mascots for these military groups in Teotihuacan. Thing is, is they dressed up in the costumes. So imagine, I don't know, I live in Denver and we have the Broncos and imagine if they didn't just have a horse on their helmet, but they dressed up like a little horse and went to battle and stuff. Wow, that's mad. And what's also interesting about that is it tells us that the people living in that apartment compound bought into the importance of the military and the importance of the ruler. But also that probably living in that apartment compound were not just people from one military group, but they participated in a couple of the military groups, which probably was useful at Teotihuacan. You always have tensions with families, you know, think about the Medici's, you know, of Renaissance and the fighting and all of the tensions in the Renaissance period between all these families. Well, if you have the military

where members of one family actually join different groups, it helps unify you. So, of one family actually join different groups, it helps unify you. So if you know, if they all join the bird warriors, and then the guys next door join the canine warriors, you'd have tensions. But if your family has members from different groups in you, I think it was one of the ways that it brought Tantua Khan together, and it made you more inclined to be part of the whole part of the state, you know, believing in the whole system rather than just your own family. So are these colorful paintings, this imagery that has survived, are they an invaluable source for people like you learning more about the Tehutihuacan military? Their costumes, the arms, the armor, how they fought, how prominent the military aspect of society was in ancient Teotihuacan. Right. We see lots and lots of images that have to do with the military,

but there's other things we see. We see writing, which we can't necessarily read. One of my colleagues, Carl Tauba, once said, you know, the hieroglyphs are so large that we missed them because they're about a foot and a half high and we're not used to that in Mesoamerica. But they're abstract. They're these weird assemblage of parts that we haven't figured out how to read the parts to create the whole, probably syllabic or something where you put them together and spells things. And some of those may very much be the names of these rulers or names of very important people in town. So that'll be a key thing that we can figure out with that in there. There's another one that tells us the importance of the military and probably state ideology. It's a very important apartment compound called

Tepantitla. And in that one, they found these wonderful images of these trees. But the tree actually is growing out of a personified mountain. So it's a roughly mountain shaped thing, but it's personified. So it becomes a deity, probably female because it has the cave like opening has the vaginal waters flowing out and that creates the waters of Teotihuacan. It did have springs at the time. Those are very much drying up at this point, but it was a very lush place in many ways, and it represents those springs. And then it has a face with this fanged mouth and triangular eyes,

and then out of the top of this personified mountain, you have two branches of a tree. It has these two branches. On one branch, you actually have butterflies. And on the other branch, you have spiders. And so what we have is an opposition, this kind of binary situation. And what I think is what you have is you have the Teotihuacan state telling people what the proper roles of men and women are. Now, this isn't an apartment compound, but this is how much the beliefs of the state enter people's lives. They buy into the system. They believe the system. And so, why do we think that these are gender roles? Well, because we go back to the Aztec again.

You know, the Spanish helped. They worked with Aztec speakers. They, you know, the Spanish helped, helped, they worked with Aztec speakers and asked them to write down a lot of their beliefs. And from that, we've got a lot of information. And in the Aztec, they talk about warriors who died in battle on the battlefield or who were taken back to another place and were sacrificed from battle. Those people were heroes. They lived a better afterlife than

everybody else. And they would live this, they would accompany the sun, which was a very sacred honor. The men would accompany the sun from dawn to zenith. And after four years, they turned into birds and butterflies and they lived off nectar and flowers, and it seems like a really paradisiacal kind of life that they got to have. That explains the butterfly side of the tree. And so what it's probably telling men is that you should be warriors. You should fight for the state. And you know, if you die in the behest of the state, And, you know, if you die in the behest of the state, you will have this sacred afterlife. I've sometimes referred to it as a Teotihuacan jihad, because it's this promise that if you fight for the state, you'll have a better afterlife.

Now, the spiders also come from the Aztec. And also the Maya, we have some evidence that the spider was a symbol of spinning and weaving. You can imagine they spin and weave webs and such. And also a symbol of childbirth. The goddess of childbirth for the Maya was associated with spiders and such. And so this tells us the gender roles for women. Women were supposed to make cloth. It was one of the most important economic contributions of a woman in her household. If they made cloth, they could clothe not only their family, but it was one of the most important economic contributions of a woman in her household. If they made cloth, they could clothe not only their family, but it was one of the few ways to have disposable income beyond what other things you're doing. Women could contribute to their family's economic health by making cloth, and then that could be, you know, sold, however economics

worked, but, you know, traded for other goods and services. But they were also supposed to have children. There's a woman, Rebecca Story, who studied the demography of Teotihuacan. And Teotihuacan was actually in decline, its population, much of its whole time. And that's because cities are terrible places to live. Cities are dirty. Disease goes rampant in cities. Any city, you know, you can go back to medieval Europe, before you had soap and before you had medicine, they were terrible places to live and you have population

decline. And so I've argued that there was probably some propaganda to actually have children, you know, to ask women to have children and having children is dangerous. We think of it as this thing that women do. But you know, I know, in England, they've done some studies about women in childbirth. And you have some of these early villages where, you know, women are gone by the age of 20. And you just have a bunch of old men and a few random women that survive the whole thing. So probably encouraging women to have children. Now the flip side, remember, I said that the sun was accompanied by warriors who died. Women who died in childbirth went from zenith to dusk, which isn't quite as noble because it's the dying sun, it's the setting sun. So when we look at this

tree, what we have is we have the ideology of doing your part for the state. Women are supposed to have children. They're supposed to weave. And if they die having in childbirth, they get to accompany the sun from zenith to dusk. It's an honor, not quite as honorable as the men, but it's an honor. Men who die in the battlefield get to accompany the sun from sunrise to zenith and it's a very noble thing to

do that and they are promised this better afterlife and so that was important because both of them are contributing economically because these warriors are not just going out and fighting for the heck of it you always hear about sacrifice and bringing back sacrificial victims sure that was part of it and they did need sacrificial victims. Sure, that was part of it, and they did need sacrificial victims. But they're also accompanying all those people engaged in trade. We have pictures of Teotihuacan warriors engaged with trade, T-R-A-D-E, not traitor, but traders. And these warriors are bringing, are making economic trade viable. It's dangerous when you go walking across

and you've got all these valuable things in your backpacks. And so you have these people that are actually enabling trade. And that's really much of the reason that the warriors were so important. It is absolutely fascinating. We've only just scratched the surface. And we can't continue much longer or my editor will kill me. But one last question quickly on this and um we'll have to get you back on to continue the story to the later date annabeth but the goggles talk to me about the goggles we had a

quick chat about it before we started recording but talk to me about the goggles that seem we see on some of these depictions what's the story behind these a lot of these warriors wore goggles on their eyes. The ones that we found are made out of shell, but there may have been multiple materials that they were made out of. Probably it associates them with another very, very, very, maybe the most important deity at Teutocon is Tlaloc. And Tlaloc is a god that's associated with water. He brings water. But Tlaloc is also a god associated with warfare. War and water are very much associated with one another. In Mesoamerica, they have a rainy season

and a dry season. It's not like other places where rain kind of comes and goes. It's very, very dry and very, very wet. And the rainy season is the time that you're going to do your agriculture. You're going to plant your seeds right before the time that you're going to do your agriculture. You're going to plant your seeds right before the agriculture. You're going to get them in the ground. You're going to tend them. You're going to harvest, and then it's not a good time to have warfare because it's swampy and wet and mushy, and you don't want to be moving your troops around in that time period. So the dry season is when you go out and you do trade and you do warfare. And those two things are involved with one another. And so by wearing those goggles, I think that the warriors are associating

themselves with that cycle of the rainy season, the time for agriculture and the dry season, the time for trade, both of things that are sustaining life, right, bringing in wealth, bringing in food, all of those types of things but those warriors are very much on that cycle and associating themselves with Tlaloc who is the god of war and water well there you go thank you so much for that quick summary and I think to wrap it all up Annabeth this has been great and as I mentioned we've only just scratched the surface we have to do more podcasts on this amazing place in the future but it also sounds like from that those new archaeological discoveries at the

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, that it's really exciting in the years ahead. There's still so much to learn from Te Atihuacan about ancient Mesoamerica, about this civilization. Right. I mean, the story is much, much more. A friend of mine is excavating the place El Perhuaca, just posted on Facebook that they found a new stela down there. And it's all the way down in Guatemala. And what does it do? It names a king of Teotihuacan that we know has been going on to a bunch of Maya cities. And another site that we now know that he was very, this Teotihuacan ruler was very much engaged in. So it had its fingers everywhere. It was this big hulking place and a

lot of people want in contact with it because they were so engaged in trade and wealth and prestige. And as I say, sometimes we know the Maya visited Teotihuacan and I always think it must be like the first time a person goes to New York City. You know, you're from maybe a small town in Kansas and you go to New York City and you know, you're from maybe a small town in Kansas and you go to New York City and you're just agog and staring at these massive buildings. That's how they felt at Teotihuacan. It was on a scale like nothing else in Mesoamerica.

And it had to have just, you thought your city was important. Then you visited Teotihuacan and you realized, oh, there's someone bigger than us. I mean, that's so interesting. You know, and I'm glad you mentioned the rulers and the kings. That's something we'll have to definitely talk about another time. I mean, but Annabeth, this has been absolutely brilliant.

A great intro overview of Teotihuacan with a particular focus on the military and like its layout and the colour and the paintings. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Oh, absolutely. And thank you for your clear enthusiasm. It's wonderful when people actually are very engaged in these things. Well, there you go. There was Professor Annabeth Hedrick

from the University of Denver explaining, giving an overview of Teotihuacan and why it's such a extraordinary, significant ancient settlement in the Mesoamericas. See, come to the ancients for ancient Rome, for ancient Greece, but stay for ancient Mesoamerica. Stay for topics like this, that we're delighted we can shine more light on, that we can give experts, brilliant experts like Annabeth, the limelight, the spotlight that they so definitely deserve for all the work, the time and effort they've put in to their own specialist areas.

So I really do hope you enjoyed this episode. And there are more Ancient America's episodes to come in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned for those. It's such a cool area of the ancient world. Now, last things from me, if you'd like more ancients content in the meantime, you know what you can do. You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. Every week I write a bit of a blurb for that newsletter.

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