Twilight of the Gods

At one time it was the most important city in the region--a bustling commercial center known for its massive monuments, its crowded streets and commercial districts, and its cultural and religious institutions. Then, suddenly, it was abandoned. Within a generation most of its population departed and the once magnificent city became all but a ghost town.

That scenario might be a cautionary account of the fall of New York after default. In fact, it is the history of a pre-Columbian city called Teotihuacan (the Aztecs' word for "the place the gods call home"), once a metropolis of as many as 200,000 inhabitants 33 miles northeast of present-day Mexico City. Archaeologists long regarded the city --famed for its Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun and avenue-like Street of the Dead--as a ceremonial center inhabited largely by priests and their retainers. Now, new discoveries suggest that between A.D. 400 and 700, Teotihuacan was literally the Big Apple of Mesoamerica, the focus of a far-flung empire that stretched from the arid plains of central Mexico to the mountains of Guatemala.

This fresh view of Teotihuacan is based on a combination of archaeological investigation and computer analysis. Mexican, U.S. and Canadian researchers, under the leadership of the University of Rochester's Rene Millon, have spent years mapping the city and collecting more than a million artifacts, mostly pottery shards and tools but also human and animal remains. After identifying and cataloguing the pieces from each location, the scientists ran their data through a series of computer programs designed by Physicist turned Archaeologist George Cowgill of Brandeis University. These enable them to determine, for example, if a particular site was the home of a priest, the quarters of an artisan, or the shop of a merchant, and to figure out how the city evolved.

The result is a fascinating picture of an ancient urban center. As described in the National Science Foundation journal Mosaic, the inhabitants of Teotihuacan lived primarily in windowless, one-story apartment compounds that opened onto courtyards. The compounds, which housed about 100 people each, were occasionally organized into barrio-like neighborhoods, but there was no real class separation in Teotihuacan. The researchers have found an almost haphazard mixture of classes and occupations throughout the city.

Clumsy Giant. Teotihuacanos used neither metal, the wheel nor draft animals. How they kept records remains a mystery; researchers have thus far found no conclusive evidence that they had a written language. But there is ample evidence that the ancient city enjoyed considerable prestige. A political and religious center dug up near Guatemala City shows what Pennsylvania State University Archaeologist William Sanders considers "a slavish imitation of Teotihuacan style." Artifacts unearthed in Belize, 700 miles away, show a similar influence.

Why did the city die? Researchers found no signs of epidemic disease or destructive invasion. But they did find signs that suggest the Teotihuacanos themselves burned their temples and some of their other buildings. Excavations revealed that piles of wood had been placed around these structures and set afire. Millon speculates that Teotihuacan's inhabitants may have abandoned the city because it had become "a clumsy giant ... too unwieldy to change with the times." But other archaeologists think that the ancient urbanites may have desecrated the temples and abandoned their city in rage against their gods for permitting a prolonged famine.

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