The rise and fall of Teotihuacan with David Carballo

this is my first time in Copenhagen I've been wandering around your wonderful city actually two cities with Kristiania for the last 48 hours and just loving it I'm someone who likes cities the ancient ones and the modern ones and so the theme today is about a city of course the one behind me teotihuacán in central Mexico just very close to Mexico City and here it is fancily reconstructed in its height and so I wanted to start broadly with this issue of understanding cities let's see if I can advance okay yeah why should we care why you know what's the point of studying early cities you seem like you know they're ruined places and lost a time are they relevant to us today living in the modern world and I hope to have the take-home point today that yes I believe that they are and looking at this map over here gives you an indication of how we as a species have become more urban over the last 50 60 years and so here in the Americas of course and in Europe are areas that have been highly urbanized well over half the population living in cities for many decades now but then other parts of the world are catching up Asia and Africa in particular becoming more urban so this is the dominant settlement type of human societies when did they arise how are they different what perspectives do we get from archeology well first at the very least we're increasing our sample size so if we only consider cities of the present or of the historical record we're dealing with you know dozens maybe low hundreds of cities where we have thousands of cities going back thousands of years through the archaeological record and so not just ones that are documented textually but ones that can be excavated and so that's that's you know one of the things that archaeologists do we focus on the material how does space work you know how is space structuring action how does action structure space what are the tangible relics of everyday life the artifacts that people use and come into contact with and so that material focus is something that I think archaeology adds to the broader discussions of urban studies and really importantly and I'll get to this point later in the talk including commoners so you know historical texts usually prioritize elite males and lost in the picture are you know people the 95 percent the 99 percent of humanity that created ancient cities and archaeology has a perspective on that we of course also have a perspective of long change over time diachronic change so going from you know the earliest days of our species to developing farming to developing big settlements that later become cities state capitals and we can see that certain processes in past cities are still relevant today so you know we talk about neighborhoods or ethnic migration to different cities this is stuff that's been going on for thousands of years and so we have a perspective on how people why people came to cities how they got incorporated into cities scaling there's a lot of fascinating work going on urban scaling processes in general as population increases urban infrastructure increases below that rate because cities are efficient they there are scalar efficiencies in cities you don't need as many roads per capita or sewage per capita because of those scalar efficiencies but social reactors the social the stuff that makes cities exciting that's increasing at a rate above population growth so an event like science and cocktails could only happen in a city or it can only happen in association with some sort of urban populace it's it's bringing this all together so now to take you to Mexico I know I've spoken with some of you today but just a show of hands how many people have been to Mexico before oh nice okay good oh and Mexico City maybe 10% or so and then Teotihuacan Oh excellent okay so we have some experts but it but this is a place you all should go you know Mexico City's lovely and the ruins here are quite accessible from from Mexico City itself so so those of you who are already familiar with central Mexico know that Mexico City is built over the ruins of the aztec imperial capital of Tenochtitlan and so that was dismantled by Cortes and the Spanish the major monuments and they became the monuments of state for for Mexico today the Cathedral the National Palace etc but central Mexico actually contains layers of urbanism there this is an area that has been one of the most densely occupied on the globe for 2,500 years going back to really early mid 1st millennium before the Common Era cities like quick Wilko which now is south of Mexico City this is sort of near the the University and where the Olympic Village was when the Olympics were there in 1968 this is we could call really the first city in central Mexico Teotihuacan what I'm going to focus on is the mid first first half of the first millennium of the Common Era it collapses into smaller city-states not really represented here that then become the Toltec state and then that collapses again and becomes the aztec state so there have been these cycles of urbanism really long-lived urbanism which makes it an exciting place to study one of the questions most often asked is you know who are the Te'o two econo as what is this name Te'o - a common what does it mean it comes to us from the later Aztecs so the Aztecs are in this area about 700 years or so after Te'o - a calm and the name ter - akan means place of the gods our place where one becomes a God and this relates to this this critical legend for the Aztecs called The Legend of the Suns which was that to start the fifth son of creation the Aztecs viewed themselves as being in the fifth cycle of the Sun the proto God sacrificed themselves at Teotihuacan and became the Sun and Moon and this is a pre-columbian coda see depicting that but at the same time the Aztecs knew that this was a city of people and they went there and they dug stuff up they were the first archeologists of Teotihuacan and they found things and they brought them back to their sacred temple the temple may or that was up on the top on that last slide this wasn't found there as found south of Mexico City but it's a lovely mask I'm going to show a mask later that we have from our excavations at the end of the talk but this one is a tear to a con mask the stone mask but all of this inlay of turquoise turquoise was it was a commodity that wasn't traded for until later after Teotihuacan it comes from northern Mexico in the American Southwest and there were trade routes running up into that area and so some later Aztec artisan got a hold of this tear to econo mask and put this beautiful mosaic work on top of it and I love it as a visual metaphor of Aztec society because aspect aside he builds on a Teotihuacan base just like this mask shows so how to tattoo a con come about it started with a bang so to speak in that there was a massive volcanic eruption this is Mexico City today and next to it is the smoking Mountain the name in nahuatl is Popocatepetl Menten and it is active near this city of 25 million people and so it's one of the most closely watched volcanoes and all over the world and it had a huge eruption in the first century this is the first century of the Common Era but in prior to that this is quick Wilko that when I showed you that was in the bottom of the last graph this was a big city and tear to a con starts developing up here as a second city within the base in New Mexico Mexico City now encompasses you know all of this area with Popocatepetl this was a huge eruption of okay look Volken estates eruption which for comparison is when Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia and it could be heard in Australia it's that scale of eruption that erupted sometime in the first century and it completely changed settlement here this way this is an area that receives more water is more conducive to human settlement and farming and it got cleared out and this ash fall reigned particularly to the east where the second big city developed named Cholula it was the second big classic city of the time actually the biggest pyramid is here not at Teotihuacan Cholula you might know it as a hot sauce it's a very good hot sauce if you like that and teotihuacan really became the big center though this is an area that's drier it doesn't receive as much rainfall but it has permanent Springs that allow for irrigation and this became the breadbasket than of Teotihuacan so people congregated here migrants fleeing this volcanic activity to the south eventually it grew to become the size of Imperial Rome in scale so these are to scale the same Imperial Rome and Teotihuacan but Terra to account is about a hundred to 150,000 people at its max these are largely contemporary cities whereas Rome could be half a million to a million and that's because in Rome people were living in three four-story housing weren't aired to a con it's this lower ranch living but nevertheless this was like really impressive the monuments this is compared to the the largest pyramid in egypt khufu is pyramid as wide as the base now obviously not as high but very different monuments so in the the Egyptian pyramids these are mortuary monuments for a king these are temples that you walk up the staircase and there's a temple structure on top and then this housing if you look at the the the grid plan and all these structures these big these apartment compounds are all laid out in this very organized way on this grid so another reconstruction here that brings up you know what is interesting about tayo to a confer for understanding cities more broadly first it's a site that was abandoned so unlike Aztec centers when the Spanish came those Aztec centres transitioned to colonial towns they were dismantled and a new colonial city went on top and they're very hard for us to study archaeologically because they're just covered over so since this had been abandoned it's available for us to study it's in a semi-arid landscape which means that archaeologists could go around mapping where structures are and make a good estimate of where people were living and how large the city was but then some of the characteristics of the city its size for its time it was the largest city in the Americas at a tight knot in the world Rome again was larger but the fact that it was cosmopolitan drawing multiple ethnic groups speaking different languages to this place that it has this high degree of planning these are all things we expect of our modern cities and so they're to become them acts as a case that we can compare with cities of historically documented times or modern times and so to do that I just wanted to throw to a cotton over your fair city here of Copenhagen and please excuse me while I butcher most of these names but where the Castella to the citadel structure up here I went up there so you know people jogging around the walls there's really cool views of the city that's near over here the the Pyramid of the Sun Complex and so then you have the city stretching up into nørrebro this is Rosenberg Rosenborg palace around there here we are sort of in the southeastern pocket where I work is all the way down here like near Island Bridge we'll talk about the real pronunciations later right it has something to do with Iceland yes someone told me that okay and there's some people who unfortunately are out over here in the harbor and other people who are over here towards Fredericksburg and I and some people are clipped off the map but it gives you an idea that this is a place of large scale that you know and you're walking here everything so no bikes like in Copenhagen no bays on a bike there are no horses there no pack animals everything is done on foot and so imagine moving around this very large space here it is today and the two major pyramids the Pyramid of the Sun over here and the Pyramid of the moon over here and this central artery that the Aztecs named the street of the dead and another complex I'll look at the feathered serpent pyramid is sort of off this map over here but this sacred centre had meaning to tear to wakanda's and they planned it at this very high level of planning first the city seems to be harmoniously in core operating the mountains of the local landscape and in fact you know these pyramids so we know that the Aztecs would refer to their temples often as sacred mountains that they are representing a sacred mountain itself and in this case you have like an artificial cave under the Sun pyramid also associated with mountains the calendar and so here I just have to give you a tiny bit of math everyone knows the solar calendar is 365 days plus a quarter or so but the Mesoamerican ritual calendar is really important for their their religious system it's 260 days this is where feasts and certain ritual events your name that had a lot of meaning about like your your destiny and life came out of this 260 day calendar so to put the two together you have the 260 plus 105 harmoniously linking the ritual and solar calendar the symbolism of the particular pyramids I'll get to in a second but they seem to convey messages associated with primal elements like water fire perhaps wind or and also big celestial bodies like for instance these names that the Aztecs give us might have actually some historical accuracy the Sun and the moon and then the feathered serpent who is Venus in the Mesoamerican Pantheon we also have this very planned unit of measurement that the whole city is conforming to so let me just present those first up on the north we have the moon pyramid and you can see that it is mimicking the largest mountain in the Teotihuacan Valley it's called Cerro Gordo over here and the moon pyramid is right in front of it we know that this statue was found about 150 years ago in front of the Moon Plaza it's a female goddess and she seems to be very similar to the deity of terrestrial waters in the Aztec Pantheon this is a massive you know it's I don't know at least three three and a half meters higher or so big statue there's a much cruder one that it's hard to make out it's the same female deity so there seems to be associated with female deities terrestrial water and only recently has it been excavated here's another little reconstruction with people mulling about in what we call the moon Plaza this man over here great man Rene Midland just passed away two two weeks ago he was the man who originally mapped the site in the 1960s and then these two are the people who directed the moon pyramid project that I was involved in that involved tunneling down underneath the pyramid so even though this pyramid had been reconstructed in the 1960s that's when the Mexico City had the Olympics and they brought the Olympic torch someone went running up the pyramid steps so they you know fit it for this national event it really hadn't been excavated nobody knew when it dated to what was inside of it and so by doing these tunnels starting in 1999 through the early 2000s we now have a sequence and the sorts of offerings that were made to different construction episodes of the pyramid these are dedicatory offerings made to consecrate a particular structure and they are involved some human sacrifice and they are highly militarized so for instance you can see that these individuals they have their arms tied behind their backs this of course is a mannequin for a museum display but of a similar type this is a different one which had three individuals seated cross-legged and these seem to be people who could have been foreigners in fact two of these might have been from the Maya area who were put into the pyramid and we have some decapitation largely and tape to work on the sacrifices match a demographic profile of war captives they are males from about eighteen to forty years of age they often have chemical bone signatures that say they are foreigners that their their bone chemistry is different from what we see within the city itself but sometimes they would also incorporate locals or non warriors these offerings were part of bigger scene that involved a suite of elements including these huge obsidian knives like you see over here in radial patterns pyrite or fool's gold discs with big jade figures like this one standing on top of it a lot of animals and that also are more militaristic ly themed like for instance Eagles and wolves rattlesnakes and depictions of the storm God and the storm God is pretty large that these water pots that were from the this is the sky rains rather than the terrestrial waters of the other goddess that we saw so we have a lot of them sort of aquatic associated images with the Sun with the moon pyramid in contrast in the Sun pyramid we have a lot of fire symbolism and this includes these big braziers that have the very identical iconography to the Aztecs when they did the new fire ceremony so they did this ceremony when the to the ritual calendar and the solar calendar intersected every 52 years they would have this huge ritual which involved extinguishing all the fires and the households everyone broke their pottery it was like a huge rite of passage and here they they bundled up the years thirteen times four and started a new fire and we have those same braziers associated with the Sun pyramid and only recently the fire God is hard to seize a little beat up but this is the old god of fire he was found in the summit of the Sun pyramid and again with the mountains when you're at the moon pyramid looking at the Sun pyramid it perfectly silhouettes the second largest mountain in the territory on Valley so they're they're choosing the symbolism and the sacred landscape in different ways to the south we have the feathered serpent pyramid this is the one that is the most elaborately adorned it's the smallest of the three but there was a huge sculptural program associated with this this is the God that the Aztecs called Quetzalcoatl Serpent and the Maya had a version of him as well he is face is on this side that was preserved so the teotihuacános themselves covered over this pyramid about a hundred years or so after it was constructed and they seemed to have looted it and negated whatever that this this cult or this deity stood for the here the feathered serpent is wearing a headdress of a crocodilian figure Mesoamericans saw the world as being on a floating crocodiles back and so like we're in a primordial sea and the Crockett and we're on the crocodiles back and this is the first day of the Aztec calendar see potli and so what we think art historians and archaeologists think that this monument has something to do with this creative deity on the first day of creation the creation of their era we also see the same headdress I should say on this mural and so that makes that a connection a little stronger only recently some fantastic offerings have been unearthed underneath the feathered serpent pyramid there's a shaft going down 15 metres into what is essentially bedrock this very hard material and then going over a hundred metres east underneath the temple and Sergio Gomez who's a Mexican archeologist has unearthed all these offerings including these statues that there were three female ones one smaller male statue preserved organic remains including balls from playing the Mesoamerican ball game which is fantastic we never had those this is brand-new stuff more vessels with that storm God as well I mentioned there is this looting episode so this is if there was one cataclysmic event in teratogens history before it collapsed it was this they spent all this time making this fancy sculpted pyramid and then about a hundred years or so later oh and this also involved sacrifice of a lot of war captives within it they chiseled down the heads of the feathered serpent and you can see the remains strewn about the pyramid and so something there was some sort of you know rejection of the cult of the dia were not sure and they covered only this face over and this is why the sculptures still preserve here so rather than chip this one down they covered it over and it's remained preserved for us and that's the one you visit at the site today we also know that the Aztecs had a standardized unit of measurement that went from the tips of your fingers to your heart which is roughly around 83 centimeters and so extrapolating from that Saburo Sugiyama is played around with some of these numbers for the major constructions at a to a con and seen some fascinating things remember that ritual calendar is 260 days that's the Sun pyramid in the TMU the turtle con metric unit the moon pyramid when it first becomes monumental corresponding with this construction is a hundred and five so the two then are complementary as the solar calendar the citadel complex of the feathered serpent pyramid is 582 that's just close enough to the Venus cycle so Venus does its heliacal cycle of when it comes up again as in the morning sky goes away for a while comes back in the night sky comes back as morning star as 584 the Aztecs associated Quetzalcoatl serpent with Venus and so perhaps that complex is also associated with that particular deity and and cosmic body then another really fascinating thing about the orientation of the city so they worked in these mountains these sacred numbers the way that the Sun pyramid is looking on the western horizon is where the Sun sets on April 29th and August 12th and those dates are separated by 260 and 105 so they're getting again these two major major calendrical cycles together the ritual one and the solar one so that's urban planning at this religious level of meaning creating a sacred space that's meaningful in within the context of religious system how about the plan from a more sociological urban planning system well we can see based on what has been excavated so far that there is a concentric type model of the city in fact Gideon's shoberg who I think was Norwegian but he's an urban planner who talks about the pre-modern model as being this sort of concentric one then tear to akan fits it you know just as well as anywhere there you have this central palace and temple precinct then you have these neighborhood centers this denser area of what you might call upper-middle class housing or middle-class housing but also the central areas that have temples associated with with houses and then these these peripheries and these peripheries are the places where you see the most ethnic migrants and you see a lot of intense crafts production but it tends to be of just common stuff Potter's construction workers stone tool makers where in here you have the nicer goods the semi-precious stones and things like that and so you certainly have this this clear status hierarchy so at the base of it is this apartment living what's known as the apartment compound here's a nicer one reconstructed where things are covered with lime stucco and painted these are really fascinating housing types for the ancient world have apartments that twenty to sixty people we're living within the walls of a single compound it's very rare that you have these sort of large houses there are again remember it's a semi-arid landscape when they did the map they could count 2,300 of these so because of that we can get really good population estimates for the city and they seem to be associated with different crafts activities that the family is specializing in and we're still starting to learn more about these and I'll come back to the apartment compounds but stepping back for a moment we could say that Teotihuacan has certain elements that make it seem more like a collective entity fortunately as chopped-off but what do I mean by that first the art of the city de-emphasizes individuals we don't ever see one named person as a powerful king or someone who is subordinate to another individual there's deities who are then people are subordinated to the the deities are rendered large there are scenes like this where you know their deities and priests making offerings to particular deities and then people are frolicking in this hill of water in the semi-arid landscape this would be you know the ultimate good and so in some ways there's a projection of a utopic order keeping this cosmic order going being subservient to the gods in over a hundred years of excavations at Teotihuacan no one has ever found a royal burial and this is pretty fascinating people who work my colleagues who work in the Maya area to the south every summer there's a new Maya tomb unearthed teotihuacános seem to not have had kings or for a lot of its history do not seem to have had a monarchy that could have been for you know certain centuries but for for other periods may be in Oleg Archy maybe something that was more like an elite assembly and aristocracy the emphasis is on housing people and in these apartment compounds housing gods in their huge temples and they were able to incorporate many ethnic groups up to five or so different languages and so this relates to just a broader interest of mine and some of my colleagues in looking at the dynamics of cooperation and collective action or self-organization and I liked at the beginning for my introduction there were some ants there and what I was thinking of I don't know if those are you know into akan we have these fire ants or when you're digging they start burning you and that's horrible but we also think of ants in the context of complexity coming out of social insects there's a lot of work in that sort of field and people are comparing cities to are they like ant colonies you know in some ways yes in some ways no but some of my colleagues are applying this data to account in other places considering rather than top-down planning very centralized planning the more organic processes emergent processes bottom-up processes and so that's one of my research interests this is recently edited book on this topic okay so this brings us to the present research that I'm doing with colleagues in this southern lehenga district now remember this was like what was how did I butcher that name Iceland bridge over here and then the Castella is over here so that's the distance that we are somewhere way out on the periphery and but you can see that it's a really clear cluster of neighborhoods we call it a district because it probably had some administrative functions that's our hypothesis here our colleagues we work with at Mexico National University unum Luis Barba and colleagues who are doing ground-penetrating radar so you see a mix of the excavation we're stripping away layers the old-fashioned way of the shovel and a pickaxe and documenting the architectural remains and the artifacts and then also using newer technologies to sense what's under the surface before excavating or we might never get to it it's you know excavations very costly and remote something can be done much more rapidly we're interested in a few different themes including how did the city grow how did it expand to the south this area had only been worked at with one project for two years in the 1970s they dug at one apartment compound we wanted to look at a couple more as well as the street of the Dead and how did the street of the Dead expand into this area what does that tell us about urban growth as a whole how were commoners organized so this this is area where just regular folks lived probably the bottom third within the socio-political hierarchy of the city and what was life like for them how did they plug into the city's economy through their craft production and exchange relations so first starting at the broader level of spatial organization as a whole we do some different geo spatial techniques including using drones and for laughing this was the map done by Rene Millen and his colleagues in the 1960s and you can see that there are you know multiple compounds here they're nice sort of squares organized on these different pages that are each about half a kilometre each page represents half a kilometre we now of course have technologies that can map much more precisely and what we're seeing is the district as a whole seems to have a less haphazard or organization as is represented here but each individual apartment compound seems to be less regular so there's a greater room for variability that way that you just couldn't see from the surface and I'll give you some examples so one technique is lidar which is a laser based mapping from an airplane it's in the way that we used it and here you can see subtle contour changes that come out really nicely when you play around with them in in a GIS and this organization seems very planned and very sort of rectangular for the district unlike that page just the last one that was mapped in the 1960s and we've been excavating in this area as this is where the street of the Dead continues over here that's never been explored previously we also using terrestrial geophysical techniques or remote sensing can see the the footprints of architectural compounds underneath the surface without excavating them so for instance you probably make out there's a compound over here another one here a corner of one over here etc and so this can all be done much more quickly than excavation this is the one compound that was excavated in the 1960s you'll notice it's now covered by housing and this is a challenge we face in this area it's it's becoming more urbanized and so we lose parts of it and so by documenting where there are compounds we have a better idea before there's construction happening over these areas and you can see that they have this more irregular pattern they're not like the perfect rectangles on the map and this one almost nicely mimics the one that was excavated we then have been excavating over the last couple years here just an image you can see the pyramids way in the distance that's that big mountain and along the street of the dead in a couple different compounds labeled 17 and 18 first looking at the street of the dead so we know in the center of town this is a highly planned feature this would be like the Broadway as a New Yorker of a o2a con the central artery nicely bounded with temples and palaces that's not what we see down to the south so the southern street of the Dead is very different it seems much more haphazard but at the same time relatively planned so you can see that people over here are respecting this centre line coming from the the pyramid of the moon-- to the south this is a modern gas tube pay no attention to that diagonal teotihuacános would hate something running that way everything has to be on this nice grid system so there's nothing built in these spaces over here but at the same time we see structures that are irregularly spaced there's a an urban planner called Spiro Kostov who talks about this and he says you know a city planner might have this idea for a nice Avenue but then the the capricious behaviors of the bordering masses and in this more haphazard pattern and I think that's what we're looking at in the southern street of the Dead in this district and we also see the construction done in this area a mix of really difficult digging through this hard volcanic substrate it's a volcanic tuft that's called tippet at a and they lowered this whole area to make this central artery and so they dug down through this really tough material and you can see where it's cut we can also see that we're working with the German micro morphologist there's at the University of Tuebingen and she shows the difference between where there's a natural layer that is weathered and where it's cut it's this very clean break between the sediments in this area and so we can see where they cut it artificially that's a big construction project but then people make these very crude retaining walls that probably were just done on a piecemeal basis by the apartment compound so there then we have a mix of more centralized planning maybe the district as a whole maybe even a city planner doing this sort of construction process the leveling but then people filling in the landscape and a more organic or haphazard way so looking at people's actual houses what they're doing in them first we see that people weren't always living in apartments oh we're finally getting a handle of the evolution of the apartment type as a form of tear to akan housing we also see that there's really intense craft production of utilitarian goods and apprenticeship happening within compounds and it doesn't seem that they're tied to any elite or to any city or state agency and then finally because they're doing this they have an access to a really broad range of resources and so people were migrating to the city because of the economic opportunities that it provided like people still do in modern cities here's some evidence of that so first for this early occupation down here you see these very informal floors with posts on them making way to the nice apartment compound so we have actually eight superimposed floor levels here that can be nicely dated give us a nice sequence for about 350 years of occupation here and this shift from more organic batch type housing to the apartment blocks that are typical of state Oakland so we see this area become urbanized in housing type we also see people change the way they did things so they used to cook in hards within their houses but you could imagine when lots of people are living together in close proximity you couldn't be lighting these big fires and so they change from their hearts down in these earlier levels to having these ceramic stoves and they're probably we're cooking away outside and then reheating food in their ceramic stoves and so it's an adaptive solution to this tight apartment compound living one of the reasons we were interested in digging in this area is we had some of these ants these fire ants which helped us to deduce that this was an area that was very dense in obsidian people in tear 2 akan did not have metal so there's no metal technology this was a city of over a hundred thousand people occupied for I Center for centuries making just stone tools so because of that this is probably the densest concentration of obsidian anywhere in the world that's not a quarry so people came here and chipped all of this obsidian to make basic tools these are tiny little pieces of blade cores I went to the National Museum the other day so the beautiful Flint that used to be worked here in prehistoric time so here this there near volcanoes and they're using obsidian and these little ants told us where it is because they're bringing up little pieces from the surface and so we dug here and we'd like to say as as scientists we do groundbreaking research of course archaeologists do that very literally and we also if we study stone tools are doing cutting edge research and as in my corny puns and we see the whole production sequence of making this utilitarian good we had over 420 kilos of obsidian from just this area that we excavated over here so this mass of obsidian that people were working to make this utilitarian cutting tool something you'd use in kitchens and thankfully for us they're burying stuff so Mesoamerican peoples see structures as animated they still do today the nawaz and Mayas will have house rituals where they make an offering to the house in consecration of it and same thing back in prehistoric times and so people are making offerings to the physical house and burying things in these little cysts here you have a nice this is a you know anyone who's enjoyed Mexican food know that you you grind corn in this mono and metate and then you can make tortillas or tamales with the cornmeal that's covering this deposit of obsidian and a few pots chock full of all these nice blade cores where they're taking off regular blades and also some points where we can see apprenticeship I am someone who enjoys making stone tools as just a hobby but also a way of learning the economic production process and I sit down with students and we make stone tools I'm like an intermediate level there's some people who are fantastic and then some people are just getting started and once you chip enough stone you have an idea of what goes into it like you know is someone producing at a high level or a low level and I probably you can tell just from looking at these that this is a pretty nicely made point this would take someone you know probably months of sitting down and and trying to make stone tools to produce something like that that's a skilled Napper as the term we use for someone who chips stone whereas here someone has made two catastrophic errors we'd call them hinge fractures they've dug into it they hit the stone too hard and it dug right into the center of it and this is a not a desirable outcome but it's okay intermediate this on day two you could be doing this I mean this is someone who is just getting started this is a crappy point and we know that there's a range of ability here likewise this is a masterpiece in stone this whoever made this blade core could control stone just the ways like those those Neolithic daggers that are in the National Museum here that it's a master of stone we're here someone has chewed this thing up and that's you know someone who's just getting started so we can see evidence that there's production in the household that the trade is being passed on within the family another nice part about this offering is it contained a couple of pots and this one is a nicer one with in Teotihuacan ceramics because it's been covered with stucco and painted just like the walls were and so people had access to to a nicer type of ceramic where it has a nose adornment so people would perforate their septum and put in these nose pieces but these are not nose plugs that you would find anywhere out on the periphery of the city like it's Langa this is stuff that you see on top of you know elite warriors or in this is the the water goddess again in the water God so it's on deities it's on important personages the actual emblems of authority and they have a pot that's reflecting those emblems of authority and it was a nicer where for them they had access to some nice stuff and we can actually see that they needed to patch it up so this is a pre-columbian patch that they've added some stucco here because it was splitting apart so this gives us a picture of a family that has some access to nice resources but needs to take care of it that you know they don't have ample access to this sort of where they also had access to marine shell coming from both the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico so they had they were plugged into these exchange routes that you know went across Mexico these aren't huge shells the the elites of Teotihuacan would not be impressed by their size but nevertheless they are plugged into this broader world economy of the time finally up to the north we excavated an another compound and this is also where we saw the earlier occupation the architecture in general in this area is relatively simple but they save the nicer stuff for their patios this is where they have the cut stone blocks and they do this you know stone floor of this southern patio and here's where we saw a termination ritual that found some exciting stuff so when again when Mesoamericans consecrate something they make an offering they also will terminate something by smashing pots and leaving offerings before they leave and that's what they did here and they smashed all these big pots and left us this nice mask so this again is giving us an indication that these people with regular humdrum cooking vessels being smashed here also had some access to nicer things like a stone sculpted mask these are the sort of iconic masks or sculptures of tr2 akan there's been about a hundred and twenty that are known throughout world collections but only about ten of them have been excavated so this is a very small sample size and it's giving us a better appreciation for how they were used so people used to think these were put on mortuary bundles like you would put it over a dead person's face it's really heavy it would just crush their skull and you can also see that they have it's perforated but the eyes aren't Doug aren't hollowed so a living person presumably won't wear this so it's probably put on something solid like a post or like an effigy body which we know that the Aztecs did and so this would be probably an ancestor and important personage within the compound who was then venerated or made offerings to within these patios so this helps us to give a face to Teotihuacan Oh commoners tell their story they were part of this picture they are the ninety to a hundred and twenty thousand strong of this city it's their production that is the economic base of this place and through household archaeology through excavating houses rather than the big monuments we can help flesh out the broader story here so what happened to take it to a con so the collapse is always one of the million dollar questions there seems to be some evidence of possible climatic stress this comes from a stalagmite south of Mexico City it's at a distance but it's showing a period that's an extended drying interval and so this could have caused some stress but we do also see that Teotihuacan lived through some real downturns in climate so that must mean that there's probably some social stresses happening at the same time what we do know is that things are being systematically burned in the center of the city at around the mid six centuries ad we also see from a regional picture it's trade corridors being shut off and the city as a whole goes through a political collapse into city-states they're still probably about twenty to forty thousand people living here in a reduced city-state until around eighty nine hundred and that's when the Toltec period takes off so even though there is collapse there is renewal and there is resilience within central Mexico here's just some evidence of that so next to the moon pyramid we would find the big roof beams that had burned and claps down to the floor in one Palace compound they can have this big marble statue that they smashed on the floor and this gives you some of that regional picture where they control trade corridors out to the of Mexico this was a tailor to a con associated site right in this perfect corridor that gets abandoned and people go up into the hills which usually is an indication of some conflict if people have to fortify so we're trying to understand that picture more a new project that I'm getting involved in is the other side of the coin of a palace but here not looking at the big structures rather the out-of-the-way places to try to understand are these storage facilities did servants or retainers live here what is the economic production happening within a palatial complex that would tell us something about the political economy of this place and so those are questions yet to answer I'm happy to also address any questions you might have today and here I end with some tow to akan cocktails and of course the fermented Meg a and say thank you and salute or what is it in Danish called scarlet let's go all right so Lou happy to answer questions

Channel: Science & Cocktails

Views: 19,954

Rating: 4.776 out of 5

Keywords: Science and Cocktails, science&cocktails, science, science popularization, popular science, science lectures, Teotihuacan, David Carballo, Mexico, Aztec, pre-Aztec, civilisations, archaeology, urbanism, Americas, rise and fall of the Aztec empire, Aztec empire, pyramids

Id: NdQJKEA4ZMI

Length: 47min 58sec (2878 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2016