Teotihuacan Urbanism and Sign System
composition: probable
witness: mural and glyphic remains in situ across the site, notably at the Techinantitla and Tepantitla compounds; the city's own name for itself is not recovered
Among the largest cities of the pre-Hispanic Americas, it planned its more than twenty square kilometers on a rigid grid anchored to the Avenue of the Dead, housed most of its population in walled multi-family apartment compounds decorated with elaborate mural programs of state ritual and cosmology, and recorded names, places, and dates in a partially understood sign system whose underlying language remains unidentified and whose very name for itself is unknown.
- among the largest planned urban centers in the pre-Hispanic Americas, gridded around the Avenue of the Dead
- population housed chiefly in walled, multi-family apartment compounds rather than dispersed households
- a state-standardized mural program of ritual and cosmological imagery repeated across many compounds
- a partially understood sign system, mostly names, places, and dates, whose underlying language is unidentified
- long-distance influence visible in the art and material culture of distant Mesoamerican sites
Teotihuacan grew, from roughly the 1st century AD, into one of the largest urban centers of the pre-Hispanic Americas, its more than twenty square kilometers organized on a grid oriented to the Avenue of the Dead and dominated by the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. Most residents lived not in scattered houses but in more than two thousand walled, multi-family apartment compounds built around interior courtyards, many painted with mural programs of processions, deities, and ritual scenes that project a remarkably standardized state religious program across the city. Glyphic signs, mostly names, places, and calendrical notations rather than continuous narrative text, appear in murals and on portable objects and at other Mesoamerican sites the city influenced, but the system remains only partially understood, its underlying spoken language unidentified, and the city's own name for itself unrecovered; Teotihuacan is an Aztec-era Nahuatl label, not the city's own name for itself, which remains unrecovered.
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