Urbanization of Daily Life at Teotihuacan

Thank You Christian for introduction well me I want to say little bit about my own background at teotihuacan whoops there I am is a skinny undergraduate if you if you know Mexican sights you know that's not too yokai that's Tula I can't find a picture of myself at a oh but I did undergraduate senior honors thesis at Brandeis University with George kögel focusing on Teotihuacan and and I spent the summer living in the village san juan teotihuacan working partly in the lab which I now direct and working partly on a fieldwork project with William Sanders and it really got me going into archaeology of Mexico which I'm still doing the 40 years later most of my career has been spent excavating Aztec sites along with my archaeologist wife Cindy Heath Smith who's here in the front row and some of my books on the Aztecs this one that Christian gave a nice plug for so I don't have to plug it do I oops shameless commercial plugs it did win an award for the Society of American Archaeology for the best popular archaeology book in 2017 so in the previous lecture that was here a month ago with Saburo Sugiyama Sahil Gomez and Julie Koh Sola and in this lecture you're getting two different views on Teotihuacan you're getting sort of the monumental view the excavations and the pyramids the rich offerings which have a lot of the produced a lot of the offerings that are in the exhibit here and today you're getting more sort of a residential urban perspective from David Carr bio and and from being so within that kind of residential urban perspective again we've got two sub perspectives David as a excavated a number of houses and structures and we'll be talking about this work and I'm going to talk about less an individual excavations than about the whole city and a map that was made by a project called the Teotihuacan mapping project and before this project here's some of the plan maps of Teotihuacan that existed an early drawing and a painting and and another map but Rene Mellon under the direction of Rene Mellon a map was produced that was really a milestone not just in Mexican archaeology but in world archaeology was one of the best Maps ever made of an ancient urban settlement and here's milind signing the book he became as you look to the National Academy of Sciences of the u.s. for this and then he was joined on the project by George kogo who after after I finished up my bachelor's degree he said there's nothing else he could do at Brandeis and he moved to ASU and then he retired from ASU and I was hired so I was hired to replace my old professor which i think is pretty cool George passed away this past year and but he really built up the lab and did an incredible amount of research at the site but this time - you'll climb mapping project was really quite phenomenal there's good conditions for fieldwork at the site if I go back to this one you see all these what what you see there are field lines modern field to start off in the aztec period the colonial period up to the modern period and the the alignments of agricultural fields match the alignments of the city and the buildings of the city these large apartment compounds often correspond to the fields that are still farmed today and so these are very good conditions for field work on the right here you can see a wall line that's still preserved on the surface these are photographs from the 1960s to with our mapping project on the left are some plaster floors that were sticking out of a of a modern construction trench and here they are collecting artifacts for the ground surface in addition to identifying several thousand ancient structures at the site they took collections of artifacts from the surface of all these different areas and those artifacts ended up on our lab this is a lab it was a different location when I was there in 1974 but the this nice building on the top left there was built under with national funds for the National Science Foundation there George kögel's direction and and that's where all these artifacts for this project and from a number of other projects are stored today so this map this is an iconic map in archaeology it was really quite amazing that they were able to reconstruct all of these buildings in their locations without excavating them all and without the use of contemporary techniques like remote sensing and and and geophysical prospecting now when I was an undergrad back then the map was published the big green book and two volumes a book of text on the right and then a fold-out book of maps on the bottom I was working on town to work on for my thesis and I needed this book and it was so ridiculously expensive I asked my mom if I couldn't get it for Christmas so oh she gave me this for Christmas present it was twenty seven dollars inflation has changed things a little bit and it's it's sort of ratty now because I well we're still using him but because of this the importance of this map coal bill and Mellon together were awarded the Kidder Award Alfred it's an Kidder award for eminence in our americanist archaeology which is the highest honor given to archaeologists working anywhere in the new world and this was in 2005 so this mapping project let's so let's a little closer at at part of the map on this I've got a square here it's 500 metres by 500 metres okay so this is a big city each page on the left here that's if that's one that's that 500 meter square it shows what you have today there's a road going through there and some farms and buildings and things and then lower right it's a little hard to see but the red the red rectangles are where millon and his crew interpreted the buildings as being and so one sort of lays over the top of the other to show what this looks like we have an excavated apartment compound and and a temple group and so this is what it looked like on the ground in the 60s the temple group is just circular contour rings where it was a mound and at the lower and you can see the excavated group and so this is how it was reconstructed by the Teotihuacan mapping project now something we've been doing in our lab down there is we have all this all these old records from this project and we're sort of doing the archeology at the map err photos that it started off with tracings from the air photos drawings of modern conditions eventually leading to the architectural map that was published and that everybody knows so what have we learned from this map well one is the size of the city people knew tattoo it was a big place but most of the attention before this was given to the pyramids and the major monuments and this project covered more than 22 the project surveyed more than 22 square kilometers but if you look at the distribution of buildings they cover about 15 square kilometers population of around a hundred thousand this is from an article impressed just accepted by a journal it's me Angela hughster and closed-off who's sitting here in the front row and a couple of undergrads had another postdoc and so we're constructing the housing of teotihuacán and the the size of the site and Dean Blumenthal another ASU undergrad created the the blue contour map of residential density another thing they showed was that you had you had several types of housing so I'm gonna start with the housing here that have been excavated this is not the tattoo with our mapping project these are buildings have been excavated because it's really one of the remarkable things about Teotihuacan is how luxurious your standard commoner housing was see the walls are all red these are mural paintings those mural paintings you see out there in the exhibit that wasn't some fancy thing only in a temple that was what most people had in their houses and it is it is it is this the lime plaster with the pigments applied before it hardened and so it's a fresco technique right the very same technique that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel was used at a Teel con to paint people's walls of their houses so here's one of them's a koala and the lower picture you can see some of the red pigment that's that survived in the lower part of that wall the the patios are open to the air to the and the rain and they have drains to take off the water and so these are these large apartment compounds each one of which had three four five six households living there now those those were called by the tide you have a mapping project intermediate state is housing that's your standard kind of housing at Teotihuacan the fancier housing they called high status residences here's one it's called the bird butterfly Palace we're standing in the plaza of the moon if you know tateo condo form where this picture was taken if you just turn right you see the Pyramid of the moon right there and it consists of a of an open patio pillars that were carved it's sort of larger more luxurious than your standard commoner housing and these things up here called al menos that I'll come back to here's a few more fancy residences Palace of the Sun is right in front of the Sun pyramid Palace of the Jaguars is right next to the bird butterfly Palace we just saw now this is something in this table I took I wonder how accurate was the classification said to have a mapping project made these judgments intermediate status housing high state is housing back in the 60s of structures that were not excavated so I said okay let's look at the exit structures that were dug after that point after 1966 and see how accurate they were and it turns out that the success rate was correctly classified as 83% in other words they I find this remarkable that back there just from looking at the surface may be moving a few rocks and finding some floors and all they were able to accurately determine the nature of the housing and 83% is I'm just amazed at that but not everyone lived in an apartment compound on the map there these little little squares sometimes interspersed between the compounds and what we think those were are probably houses built of Adobe without stone walls there are little there concentrations of artifacts on the surface living debris potsherds obsidian and so on but without the concentrations of stone architecture of plaster floors that suggests a stone building so we think maybe they were like contemporary adobe houses from Mexico those are my aha those in Mexico and they're now grown men's this is taken a little while ago another thing we learned from the map is a degree of planning and you'll see here there's the north-south avenue called the Avenue of the Dead and all the buildings are lined up with that it's 16 degrees east of true north and and it was really quite an extensive amount of planning to get the whole thing lined up together we also learned the spatial patterns of urban life now this is an illustration from my senior honors thesis note the very carefully hand colored I remember doing that I remember these colored pencils in hand and wasn't kögel gonna be so proud of me cuz I'll have these nicely cut here and what I was doing to my thesis was comparing different kinds of structures so the green ones are your standard apartment compounds or an immediate status residences these dark blue ones were high status residences and yellow are the temples and the white ones are ones that didn't have enough artifacts to to study in our sample kögel did a whole series of distribution maps showing how artifacts are distributed these are plaster smoothers is supposedly they're Mason's tools used to smooth plaster whether they actually work that way it's an open question but there are more common in some parts of the site than others and so KOCO made many of these sites many of these maps this was a fairly early one I think this is back from my undergraduate work but Ian Robertson it was a student of George's ASU as PhD there has continued that work of looking at spatial distributions so lucky shows here is different levels of status the highest status are the yellow and then green and blue or intermediate and red as we called low status housing you see sort of a general concentric kind of patter and fancy houses are along the street of the Dead the the lowest ones are toward the edges of the city neighborhoods we we took the work Ian had did done similar to those two maps and then divide them up further and George Colville was part of this for a comparative project we had on neighborhoods in early cities the map is used in this exhibit if you but if you look at the catalogue for this exhibit pieces are arranged and pieces are located from where they're from using basically a redrawing of the territorial Cod mapping project map so this is from the from the catalog tab geo mapping project also did a series of test excavations there's Rene millon and my favorite photograph from this that we found in the lab in Mexico and this would publishes this one notice that the archaeologist upside down this is Juan V darte and he's taken a picture of this thing here now notice the graduate student with his hand under the camera they didn't want to break the camera if the guy on the rope dropped the camera that's Warren barber who recently retired as a as a faculty SUNY Buffalo but why are they spending so much effort like hanging upside down and being careful to camera to take a picture of a block of stone well because the this this is what that looks like okay this is that one of those pictures that he took that we found in our records in the lab in Mexico now what is this thing well oh this also is sort of how many archaeologists take to get a stone slab into the back of the truck and there's George Coe go he's looks like he's supervising he's not actually lifting but what these this is a Zapotec glyph it's a kolender achill glyph like those used by the Zapotecs down at Montalban Montalban here and Oaxaca and Mexico was contemporaneous with Teotihuacan very distinctive style of carving and hieroglyphs and and kolender --ax and that's what that is and that's right out here in this exhibit and for me this is one of the most remarkable things in the whole exhibit here because this it's it's called the Stila stone monument it shows that there were groupies Apotex living at Teotihuacan and they built a tomb in the style of what they did back home and in Oaxaca and they have a glyph carved in the zapotec style and this urn which is also in the collection here it's not right next to the Stila but it's it's there is a Zapotec funerary urn it's nothing like standard stuff at Thao and this was a like an ethnic neighborhood maintained for several hundred years they were probably merchants we know there was trade back and forth from Teotihuacan to Oaxaca probably to montalban and these merchants were burying the dead using a tomb of their own style they had their own style of arc of pottery the oaxaca style of pottery not like local ones and so this monument here is tangible evidence of that and it's for me it's one of my favorite things in this exhibit temte of our mapping project was never finished they didn't publish their excavations they'd have finished the artifact analyses the results aren't available they did publish the map and when the map came out this was from an Abbe to Texas press they were projected nine volumes of which only one which was the map was ever published well no this one was the ceramic chronology was actually published so what about all that other stuff well we have a project to revive what we can of the table with our mapping project to try to finish these things up one of the things we're doing is writing up the excavations we have the notes we have the photographs we have the information that just has to be done a lot of this is falling to a rally at Cabrera who is a student of George Cole she got a PhD at ASU a number of years ago and her father Ruben Cabrera was an archaeologist at Teotihuacan he was the you know Sahil Gomez or Saburo Sugiyama of his day he's retired now but he was a Maine archaeologists excavating Teotihuacan for several decades and so she is from the sort of a family of Teotihuacan royalty in archaeology and she's that she's the direct direct of operations for our lab in Mexico she's a half-time ASU employee and it's fallen to her and she's wanted to take on this task of writing up these excavations and trying I think figuring out like what kind of rope did they use and what kind of insurance of this guy have finishing up the artifact studies there's a couple of MIT students have obsidian dumped out top right those are a bunch of Almain of fragments we'll come back to them in a little bit here's where we put our artifacts sometimes sometimes our lab seems like this to me you know it just seems like endless boxes in an endless location and but we do have a lot of boxes we have more than 20,000 boxes of artifacts so what we're doing is we're sending Museum Studies students from from asu's program museum studies we're sending these students down to help us catalogue so these are the first two who went down and we have Christine and Tia who were down this past summer sitting over here because there's a lot of stuff to catalog a lot of stuff to organize and they're helping us do all this and each year we get a little bit better organized a little bit more together and then reviving the project we're using the data we have a bunch of people working in in my lab here at ASU here's an undergrad from a couple of years ago working with it with the book with the table con map this article is based on work we're doing in my lab here on housing and population burials we're working on burials not these burials though these are the burials that Saburo and sarah hyo and we're talking about in their lecture there's a young Saburo Sugiyama and lower right there he's inside the pyramid and all these few pictures are inside the pyramid of the moon-- these tunnels that they dug in to excavate know we're looking at barrels under the floors of houses most people at Teotihuacan were buried under the floor of their house you would have a plaster floor and they would just did a little oval section out of the floor put the burial in usually the individuals flex position and then some pots or some beads or a few things in as as offerings so here's a bunch of goods that were the offerings of one particular burial in a residential context this was not an elite burial this wasn't someone fancy this was just a regular old person and their burial well note these two things okay these are these are fairly fancy kinds of pottery okay these are and these are from the exhibit here they aren't the two in that last offering but they're the same kinds there's a distal painted which actually on the top left there that's a fresco technique they adapted the wall painting fresco technique to Potter it's a thinner layer of plaster and the paints are a little bit different so these are fairly fancy vessels but they again they are from the burial of a commoner of a regular person it really shows a level of sort of wealth and prosperity at the site now lots of these burials have been published hundreds of them but they haven't really been well analyzed so we have a project going with a bunch of students here at ASU and that's what that's our group from last year actually have a couple high school students working on that too and we're taking these descriptions of burials and we're setting up a database and then we're gonna be able to look at questions like well what are the differences between males and females okay and then different types of burial goods are there different numbers of burial goods we're gonna look at how the house is different from one to the other can you predict say if someone has a lot of burial goods that they were wealthier than some other burial with a few these are some of the things we're going to be looking at and it's a project of pretty much all undergrads plus a couple high school students and and it's fun working on this I'll main us these roof ornaments these are this is a typology worked out of five types of these ornaments and four of these types are here in the exhibit everything in Sep type - we know there were roof ornaments because see where those green arrows are those had well here let me show this this is the bird butterfly Palace is this pow elaborate residence and you see the Alamein is on top and when this building collapsed what you're seeing and the old photograph there is the excavation of that courtyard where the Albano's were the last thing to fall and they're on top of the other all the other debris so we did a study of whole Almeida's all these of course in the exhibit or in our catalog that we're working on we found over 700 fragments of these from the turist collections those collections were made in the surface of the ground the AOD with my mapping project and that's what the pile is there these are not real impressive they're not you know fancy hole objects and they were sitting they were sitting in their bags that they were put in in 1964 no one had studied these this is the ways we're sort of completing this project and finishing the analysis of these things when I when I took over the lab I thought at first you know I need to establish myself not just as someone does a stack archaeology but actually doing research at Thao so what about a limeños I like all - and I asked George kogo and I said hey is anyone studied the al menos from the surface collection did you find any says we have hundreds of them I said who study dosas well nobody so we've classified these and published a small study of these things so here's some in the exhibit the one on the left there is just like the ones that the bird butterfly Palace although this one is from a different context and then you have these animal Almeida's the two against the wall are ceramic you can see there they're Tenon's there at the bottom where that would been inserted into the the construction of the walls the one the foreground here is is a nice fine stone alabaster I think this was my attempt quickly to show where the Almain is in this exhibit we're from at the city and it's a little bit hard to see but I don't know the bird ones we're from around the moon pyramid the circular ones are from the bird butterfly Palace and and so on so one of the remarkable things about tattoo upon and about this exhibit is the level of sort of richness and prosperity that suggests in most Mesoamerican sites such as this is from my own excavation Cindy's my excavations at Aztec sites small houses people lived in a house an average of 20 to 25 square meters it's just a small rectangular house plain pottery that's from an offering a burial offering lots of fragments one of our lab assistants and Yavapai she doesn't look too pleased to but you know we had over a million plans in that project and no sculptures house does not have sculptures you can read about this stuff here just you know just so you know hi you know I want to deprive you and it is for sale in the book start thank you Christian for that but when we look at Teotihuacan okay here's a residence now this was a multi-family residence is that a telco but the average family part of a residence of Teotihuacan okay I take the total area and then divided by how many families are in there which is what we've been working on was over 200 square square meters in other words almost 10 times the size of an average Aztec house a commoner Teotihuacan had a house ten times as big as a commoner in the Aztec period they had sculptures in the house a lot of these old fire-god sculptures the ones here for the most part are big pieces okay but a lot of these are much smaller okay and they're found within regular houses they were some kind of hearth cut some kind of God relating to the family and domestic ceremonies at home and al - and these were not limited to elite residences some of the commoner residences have these al menos - it's just it's a pic life at Teotihuacan seems to be more prosperous more luxurious than in in many other Mesoamerican societies and so okay if we had this exhibit like this for the Aztecs okay we had a big Aztec exhibit from Mexico and comes up the Phoenix Art Museum there would probably be very little in that exhibit that is like stuff from regular houses it would be stuff from the temple of my are from pyramids from burials with kings and priests and all that but in this exhibit from Teotihuacan a lot of this stuff here is not from fancy context a lot of this stuff these pottery vessels or elements that they're from houses they're from regular houses of regular people yet they're very fine objects a lot of effort went into them and they they suggest a certain level of success or prosperity so this is really quite a remarkable exhibit for revealing a wide range of things about life at a to a con it's not just things from burials under pyramids that we hear last time well that's an important part of Teotihuacan and we heard a lot about at the previous lectures but also about life of the common people life of the you know 99% and and to show this material in a place like Phoenix that hasn't seen this stuff before it's really quite remarkable and it's it's a really a fantastic exhibit I'm gonna leave you with some of the famous people who've been to Teotihuacan now I don't know if anybody in here can identify all four of these people okay we have Tarzan you know I thought Tarzan was just there to visit because the Johnny Weissmuller cars at movies were filmed Yuri out back where we used to work in Morelos we thought maybe he came up for a visit but there's actually wasn't at a party last night and someone showed me there was a Tarzan movie at Teotihuacan I haven't seen it yet I'm dying to see it now Jorge Luis Borgess you know a very influential writer probably one of the most famous authors not to win Nobel Prize in Literature he was at a oh there is the zoo today laughs pedro infante of course filmed at least one of his movies at Iwo Connor riding horses up and down history of the dead and David Bowie and there's others is Jim Morrison and other famous people but this this exhibit is really it's really important to show what what life was like a tear to belong to a wide audience and for me it's it's a lot of fun it's great to see it and I'm so glad that we have a lot of people who are interested in it so thank you very much hi everyone good afternoon it's a real pleasure to be here it's snowed in Boston this week so I'm very grateful for the extended fall I'm receiving by being here and it's wonderful to see this exhibit again now in its third city in such a great city to come to in Phoenix I think this will build on very nicely with what Mike was just talking about especially issues of quality of life standard of living within Tate to a con and I'm going to base that primarily on my own excavations which include in the southern periphery of the city a place called the Tonga district and this is would be considered like an outer borough of Teotihuacan really on the on the urban periphery and then right in the dead center across from the Sun pyramid at a compound called plaza of the columns or plaza the Lascaux luminous and so I just wanted to connect that to contemporary concerns so you know for the who cares question which archaeologists sometimes receive not in places as grand as archaea as tear to a con rather but you know we can answer social questions we can contribute to discussions that are in other social sciences so for instance those of you who know the work of Matt Desmond a sociologist who wrote this Pulitzer prize-winning book evicted and he has this great web page the eviction lab that you see on bottom left really documenting our housing crisis for the poor within our own country and how questions of sort of urban planning or policy intersect with class issues and socio-economic inequality in urban settings in our own country and you can also see on the bottom right the acceleration of inequality after the post-world War Two boom years in our own country and this is something that you know to introduce one little sort of wonky economic term the Gini index or coefficient is is is just a way that economists and political scientists and others measure inequality and so basically zero would be complete equation of resources among a population whereas one would be a single family or person had them all and you see over time since the 60s and this I think was from 2011 and it continues to rise so these are issues that we are concerned with today and we can turn to historical and archaeological cases especially like Teotihuacan where we see that people lived pretty well for their moment in history like Mike just mentioned we have a real wealth of information on Aztec household so since the mushiya capital of Tenochtitlan became the center of new spain in today's Mexico City and was documented so extensively this is one of our best studied Native American traditions and so we know that people organize themselves in around a patio we archaeologists call that a patio group but even that the name in nahuatl is translates as those who share a patio there's also the larger Cal Poly that means your big house and your big house is sort of like a clan or an extended family you're associated with and then the tech alley which is the the lordly estate system so we have examples of all of them and on this image on the left is one that I love that comes from the Florentine codex where native scribes from Plata loco which is just north of Tenochtitlan working with the Franciscan friar Sahagun recorded 12 volumes of Native American life ways including things like domestic life so this particular plate illustrates different types of houses and you can see that they vary in their elaboration and this was very important to the the Toluca scribes so for instance from down here on the bottom where you have sort of Poland thatched houses or earthen houses and in fact the Nahuatl word for an earthen house is a chakali which means an earthen house and that became hoc I'll here in the southwest and as the origins of the English word Shack whereas up here you have the sort of elaborate lordly Manor tecala of masonry buildings much more elaborate and large maybe some fresco painting or some sculpture at the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum so if we take this sort of understanding of at least how the the Aztecs perceived houses we can look at Teotihuacan and see some similarities but some real points of divergence like Mike was talking about so first off here's an image so here to a con is is early first millennium of the Common Era the same basically a contemporary of Imperial Rome in the old world and this image over here gives you an idea that the footprint the urban footprint of Teotihuacan was quite similar to the walled city of Rome they're drawn here to scale Rome had more people though and this is because partially because houses were more closely packed together but also were multiple stories so Rome had apartment living and these are called the insula and the insula are very different forms of apartments because there are mostly renters and there are mostly low-status houses and about a quarter of Rome's population lived in this sort of arrangement whereas on Teotihuacan which seems to be unique in all of the pre-industrial world eighty to ninety percent of the population lived in multifamily apartments and you've seen that these are pretty elaborate it's more ranch-style living and so the population density is is lower relative to Rome but for the Americas this was the most densely occupied area so the apartment compounds then are very nice especially towards the center of the city they would house dozens of individuals and based on the territorial con mapping project that you just heard about where the visibility is good and mark geologists could walk over the surface and sort of gauge theirs rises and architecture they estimate some between two to twenty three hundred two thousand to twenty three hundred of them exist throughout the city and early on based on limited excavations at different compounds people noted that they're often associated with particular craft activities like this apartment compound specializes in making one or two things and this one makes makes other ones and as part of the commercial economy for Teotihuacan they didn't completely come out of nowhere but they are again unique and they go away with the collapse of Teotihuacan so we don't see Aztec period apartments for instance like Mike showed but so on the top left over here you have sites and and on the bottom left a reconstruction based on a site called two timppa which is in southern puebla and was covered by an eruption of the volcano Popocatepetl the houses are really nicely preserved and we can get a view of these patio groups with there being three structures organized around a courtyard and that really becomes then the core of apartment compounds where they have a courtyard with a central altar and buildings around it and so we see that tradition earlier than tailored to a con we also see recta Lane rectilinear houses in denser places like quick wheel Co is the first city in the basin of Mexico prior to Teo to walk on and if you sort of stuck these two things together and made them much larger you have the basic principles of an apartment compound we also see in the city that there's the principle of spatial replication with nested levels of similar principles so this is a an architectural historian spiral Kostov who talks about there being sort of the arrangement of rooms around a courtyard like we see you know in an apartment compound then those apartments say around a Plaza and we have those each neighborhood would have its own central plaza with temples probably there were some local markets maybe the ball games were played there at a local level and then the city as a whole now tato two accounts not arranged around a central plaza but it does have the street of the Dead and it's it's it's large monuments as the the central axis of the city so as a whole in the city we then see a concentric organization sort of a bull's-eye pattern and different urban theorists have talked about this so in the industrial era in the mid the city center you had factories and so people tended not to want to live near the factories they produce a lot of smoke and waste and so higher status residents then live in the outer ring but in pre-industrial cities this pattern is reversed and that applies atoh to akan so you have this central palace and temple precinct around the central street of the Dead you have an interior core of the nicer apartment compounds the one was with the finer murals and these were also the neighborhood or barrio centers would be located in these areas with their own plazas and their own temples and then you have the outskirts and this this urban periphery included more of the migrant commune so for instance Mike showed the Oaxaca is a patek barrio out here on the western periphery there's a West Mexican district what's called the merchants barrio over here are people from the Gulf of Mexico and where I'm excavating to lehenga includes also some West Mexicans maybe from Michoacan whereas then also the Maya seem to have a more central presence in the center of the city so there could have been some four to five different languages spoken in Teotihuacan making it a real cosmopolitan place for its time so Mike's already shown nicely how apartment compounds can relate to social status and I want to build on some of the work that he and colleagues have been doing in looking at how can we rank households or apartment compounds based on how elaborate they were how much living space there was etc and so here on the bottom right you see a really big apartment compound where the units relatively speaking are smaller forte to a con but they would have been large by austex standards so about 220 square meters per apartment block or household whereas this intermediate status residence to teethe 'la that has finer mural paintings as well is is over double that so we can get an indication of the different ranges of social status and and so mike and colleagues have then published a number of a Gini score which is extremely low Forte to a con of 0.12 and here I've just grouped it with some compilations from history and you can see at the upper end of historical monarchies are around in the middle about you know 50 and interestingly that's where the u.s. is right now so we're at sort of at the historical levels of monarchies where as republics and more pluralistic governments tended to be lower but to economy you can see over here is lower than all of them so I think this is a wonderful way of demonstrating differences in status and I'd like to continue to pursue it so one first step of looking at a different source of data was to look at stature of burials so all things being equal if people grow taller then that's saying something about their diet and health and so you can see if there are disparities among Elite populations and common or populations there might be greater inequality and so this sample shows from firaon ik Egypt you see really high differences between the noble and common burials this is Mycenaean Greece also a pretty stark difference whereas the new world cases from the Maya and Teotihuacan are much more equal with Teotihuacan being even more so there are some issues with these data for to a con because of what I'm using here for the elite burials were the sorts that are found in the pyramids that are decked out and Jade but we don't have say royal tombs for Tailored Khan it's one of the big the big puzzles and I'm happy to talk about when we we get to questions so here's the city again in the two contexts that I've been working at so in the South the Tonga district and in the city centre the plaza of the columns but Tujunga district just for you know scale if it's a kilometer bar over there it's a mile and a half from the city centre so it's at quite a distance and this is a collaborative project there was a previous Penn State excavation and one apartment compound of the about 80 to 90 that exists in this district in 79 80 we also have a co-director Ken hearth who's from Penn State and continues that institutional legacy and then researchers from unum Mexico's National University including Luis Barbra who's the director of the geophysical prospects in lab so these are techniques that you can use on top of the surface to try to gauge where there are buildings or walls underneath the surface without excavating so over two seasons of excavation and here you get a sort of sense of how far back we are so you know these are big pyramids right and they look like little blips way over here because you know we're a good mile and a half from the Sun pyramid Oh over here is Cerro Gordo the big hill the biggest hill of the valley guides us better but we excavated at two different compounds 17 and 18 and then along the continuation or extension to the south of the street of the Dead and what we've been learning is that this suburban area this area out that becomes sort of you know outer borough or is out on the periphery was originally fields agricultural fields in a more rural setting so we can see the change from this more rural setting to becoming urbanized and part of teh to a cons urban grid we can also see evidence of utilitarian craft production just making basic household stuff that you would use in your kitchens or for daily tasks and but they were made nicely and very mass-produced for the local commercial or market economy without any evidence that there were sort of elites or any sort of palace complex that was directing this it was it was household scale production and in return for having this sort of trade this gave the people of Tujunga and access to resources that were part of this inter regional economy and so people who were then at the bottom quartile or third perhaps of the city's socio-economic spectrum had some access to nice stuff some of which you can see here in this exhibit so in one area we were able to go down over ten feet in the excavations and get a whole sequence of eight different living surfaces so archaeologists love to do this at stratigraphic excavation because it gives us time depth but the problem is if you have more elaborate buildings like with murals on it or fine concrete you don't want to disassemble them but in this particular case we have sort of more earthen floors and Adobe's and it was easier to to get this window down to the earliest levels and when you look down at the earliest levels you have pretty simple floors made of Kappa Tata is a volcanic tuff that's the substrate of central Mexico and they've sort of crushed it and stamped it down and these are posts from wooden posts so it's the sort of rock I'll or wattle and daub or earthen type house like that made of perishable materials whereas if you look up a little higher in the stratigraphic levels you start to see the walls made of adobe's and stone and more formal concrete floors that are typical of apartment compound so we can get that change and we can gauge it as happening around 250 to 300 or so AD down at the lowest levels there's also a change in how people cook food so at the base levels we have hards and like this is the typical rural pattern that you would cook your food in a fire pit like this but on the upper levels they go away and people make an urban out of patient of living in close proximity to each other by making these ceramic stoves sometimes called Onofre is in Mexico so where you would Burtt you would have charcoal in the bottom and you could sort of simmer a stew or your atole up on top of it and probably large cooking that was really smoky would have been done outside of the apartment compound to not get the smoke in in your neighbors apartments so we see also an adaptation and technology for urban living so archaeologists are prone to corny puns and I'm no exception to that rule so we all like to say we do groundbreaking research because especially when we're excavating but those of us who study stone tools also do cutting edge research and here we have both of them in this one particular compound to lehenga 17 where we discovered really intensive evidence of obsidian production and in just six weeks of excavating here we uncovered something like 425 kilograms of obsidian and including some of the large of city--and cores two of them that you see in the exhibit over here and then tons and tons of these byproducts the little chips of stone that were part of the production sequence and over here my collaborator Ken hearth and his students from Penn State have analyzed some three hundred thousand pieces so this is now the largest most detailed analysis of obsidian workshop at 8:02 economy so here's that compound and people were working obsidian on a platform that is in between the compound and the street of the Dead that runs over here but thankfully they were also making offerings to the house and this is a standard Mesoamerican practice so amezo American people's view buildings as animate entities and they needed to be in sold with offerings and then they also needed to be terminated or desacralized through rituals of termination over here you're seeing dedicatory offerings and what these folks had a lot of was obsidian as they were obsidian workers and so they were caching or they were ritually burying these cores and you see - from this exhibit that came out with spot also in the exhibit from this little cyst that's in this is a drain so this is a courtyard and it would they would make these drains to go drain water to the street of the Dead and the offering is an assist within the bend of that drain there were 18 of these very nice cores this stuccoed pot and then you see some other it was covered with a little maize grinding Matata and mono and other places where there's caches of obsidian some shells and burials within these few room blocks it wasn't a very extensive excavation but very rich in information what we can tell from the obsidian is that there's a range of skill levels present in the families that were practicing this trade and you might be able to tell from these photos certainly if you've ever sat around chipping stone which is something some of us archaeologists like to do at BU we have a flint knapping Club and so we sit around with students and and make stone tools and I can tell you from you know being off and on a Napper someone who makes stone tools that you know this is a pretty nice tear to a con point this is someone with high skill whereas here someone is more intermediate they know how to make the basic forms but they've made too costly errors this one is called a hinge fracture where they're trying to thin it and they ended up with these with these deep gouges out of it and this one is just pretty junky I mean this I wouldn't say that to a student who was just starting out but this is someone who you know has probably been out at 2 days or something like that and it's just getting their bearings here is something that I could never make even and when I was doing my dissertation was doing this pretty regularly a very fine blade core I think this very one is in the exhibit whereas this one is more of my style I probably could you know do a job like that on it so we're seeing then a range of abilities consistent with training in the household the next generation of people a practices trade this is the other compound just in the north of there 18 and here we dug in the center where the courtyard is and the rooms adjacent to it and Mike showed some of these things they are you know if it you've ever grouted your kitchen or bathroom you know you use a float and it's basically the same sort of shape that you're you're putting over you could apply mud you could apply concrete or maybe you could apply plaster we're doing some microscopic and chemical analyses to try to determine what's in the little grooves of these these are you know made of a pumice stone so they could capture some of that yeah we see other burials and materials so although here we don't have a clear workshop like in the other one possibly the fact that there were a number of these might suggest that they were involved in some construction activities that that was one of their trades but by far the most spectacular deposit here was a termination ritual that yielded this mask that is in the the exhibit so here's the room it's a it's a courtyard and you might be able to make out all these pieces of big broken pottery here and they're complete vessels that were smashed down to the floor and this is the basic utilitarian pottery that was made in where they excavated in 79 80 where they had the actual potter's compound it's a type called San martín Orange it's just a orange ware but it's it's the the typical food cooking and storage vessel up here you see a maze grinding tool you see this is a nicer one of those smoothers and other just domestic tools that have been filled in and smashed here and so we could even reconstruct these vessels and find the the amphora and basins and one of those ceramics stoves so what the excavations then until hinga are telling us is that by pursuing utilitarian production like making obsidian tools like being a Potter to make basic you know kitchen wares people had access to relatively nice stuff and this was unlike other parts of Mesoamerica at the time so people probably would have migrated to Teo to akan even to live on its periphery because they had economic opportunities that weren't available to them in other parts of Mesoamerica they had access to shell that came both from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coasts and here we're up you know mile above sea level so that's it's quite a journey few hundred miles and they had things like this nice mask and so this is you know like a classic item from Teotihuacan there's you know over a hundred known but most of them haven't been scientifically excavated there's only about maybe ten or a dozen that have been excavated by archaeologists and most of those have been in the center of the city I think all of them actually so what this one is telling us so even though it's just you know another object in the exhibit I hope you appreciate it as something that says okay even this lowest sort of rung of Teotihuacan socioeconomic status had access to these nights nicer things and that they also took care of them and that's what the stuccoed pot tells us over here you see these little pieces of stucco patched on to the plaster and not painted and we didn't do that as conservators that was something that was done in pre-hispanic time so it tells us that this this family had access to nice stuff but they also had to take care of it or curate it sort of like an heirloom okay now for contrast we can go to the center of the city briefly where we've been working more recently and those of you who were here when Saburo Sugiyama spoke he's excavating there along with his daughter na wa who I guess is coming in a month and Veronica Ortega who's from the the zone from inna and Bill fashions from Harvard and so it's a big project associated at this Civic ceremonial Center over here on the map this was done using lidar the technique that shoots laser points down at the surface and gives you very accurate mapping and you might be able to make out that there's you know a very large plaza here this is the street of the Dead we're right across from the Sun pyramid you see us over here with these large mounds and these are some of the larger temples that haven't been excavated at a to a con and where most of my colleagues have been working is up to the north and I'm not sure if Saburo showed them when he spoke here but they've been finding very nice pieces of a Maya style mural so the Maya Maya artisans seem to have created a very nice mural in the northern part of this compound that then was completely destroyed and broken small little chunks and that tells us a little bit about possibly the political history of this area because after that point Teotihuacan seems to conquer or have some military action against Tikal and Guatemala and so it seems like diplomatic relations have gone sour at that point sometime in the later fourth century but so in any case you know if you look at the the mounds here you can tell that they're more substantial than where we are digging down here although there are buildings here and so our hypothesis going into these excavations were that up here is where where the real elites live this would be your higher highest rung of Teotihuacan whereas down here it might give us insights into how a palatial or administrative complex was run so some possibilities we floated or you know maybe they're storage facilities maybe they're kitchens maybe some sort of servants lived here and so we've done two different seasons of excavation I'm not going to go too much in detail about them except for this one building because this one complex proved to be a residence and so we were excited by that because it told us okay people are living in the southern area not in the big fancy buildings but there are very nice buildings much more elaborate than what we see in Schley hanga so we can see sort of a lower tier elite may be an administrative class a priestly class that was occupying the south of this this complex and the ways that we can know that it's domestic is very thankfully and this is so rare and tear to a con so when you find it it's a happy day that these people left their metate their maize grinding slab right on the floor over here of this room and behind it they were throwing trash and that's pretty rare that you find these trash deposits but it's full of domestic trash in this little corner between two platforms so they'd filled up with domestic refuse we also have Mike showed Al Mena's and so we have that type two that we're decorating the front of the building and this I've already sort of set them flat but the same sort of image that Mike showed of them have you know falling off the front of the building which would be here and there's a staircase that we excavated over here fell down and so those would have been crowning the top of the building we also throughout the two seasons excavation have shown that this area of the compound has the densest obsidian of the whole area in fact it's equal to the other three excavation fronts combined in density but here they're not making they're not mass producing obsidian rather they're using obsidian knives or blades to do other things and so they're processing stuff it might have been food activities that might have been craft activities to be able to determine that we're going to use use where analysis where you look at the edges under a microscope and but there's some sort of economic activity that occurred there that's different than the other parts of this compound so there are two artistry constructions of a residential area in the south of plaza of the columns that that would be intermediate status based on just sort of the living the footprint the area that people had for their houses whereas down in Tujunga more low status occupation but there's also an important difference you can see you know from this reconstruction in the types of construction materials involved in making these two houses and the fact that one of them's elevated on this big platform it has roof adornments it has nicely cut stone and this sort of gets back to that first image of Aztec houses and how they would classify them so something I've been looking at is okay now what goes into making different forms of Teotihuacan architecture and thankfully there is an Arizona State student or former student Tatsuya Murakami who did this for his dissertation under George kögel and so Tatsuya had people construct of quarry transport and construct tio2 a Const I'll architecture over here making two lootable arrow buildings and that includes you know cutting the stone putting it into place covering it with lime plaster and so he came up with different estimates of how many hours or days actually in-person days they see on the the left column these activities would have taken and now if we combine the most extensively excavated to hanga compound with the one I showed from Columbus we can see that actually the telinga compound involved more labor more person days to construct than this one but the problem is that one's considered probably larger so what I've done here is standardized by labor per square meter so one is 400 square meters the other is over two thousand square meters and when we correct for the difference in size then we can start getting at differences in late in-person days but between the constructions here and here you know we have a difference of about five that it took you know five more person days per square meter in building the higher or the intermediate elite residence and then here I've done the same thing but estimating how many people might have lived there so how many you know labor days per occupant and the result comes out very similar so about four or five times the difference so with these sorts of methods of considering construction quality considering stature considering the types of artifacts that are associated we can get at a more fine-grained understanding of status variability within thao to akan and but the overarching message is that people lived pretty well in this ancient city and that there were incentives for people even at the lowest rung on the urban periphery to migrate to it and to to learn a craft trade and contribute to what became the most robust economy of classic period Mesoamerica so I hope we have some lessons there for ourselves as well thank you very much tell me where they got their source of water so there are two rivers that run through yeah okay two rivers run through the city and the amazing thing teotihuacános loved this grid that they had and so they actually diverted the rivers one in particular the San Juan River to conform to the grid and sort of make these 90-degree turns at no Riverwood whereas the other one sort of runs in a 45-degree angle so they did have those but you know this is a semi-arid area so they didn't always have those overflowing with water so there do seem to be cisterns for some sort of rain capture and if you dig you can also make wells now today that's like when someone digs a pull so or a subterranean well it's I think something like I'm gonna say 60 meters so it's pretty deep so but in ancient times that could have been different so if you saw Sergio's presentation from the tunnel that's 15 meters deep and it remained wet there so like there is a good wood preservation because it was humid that's a little closer to the river so figure somewhere between 15 to 50 meters below you could tap groundwater as well and then finally there's a system of lakes that was southwest of the city and that would probably not be that useful in terms of like but on a last-ditch nest need people could get fresh water in the lake systems they probably wouldn't to move it such great distances on a regular basis though or add a question to my question is how is the heavy done osteo like pathology studies and class and gender with and thus does that also help support your hypotheses on class differences in this urban environment yeah that's a great point and there has been work I personally haven't done it but Rebecca's story is the bio archaeologist she's at university Houston who did a the analysis of all the burials from lehenga and there that she had a big sample of burials and what what she did document was relatively high infant mortality but it's infant mortality that is very comparable to Rome's so the two like ancient cities had similar profiles you know so when people are living in dense proximity they're passing diseases off to each other and so so this lower status population of teja one seemed like comparable to this old world population the difference of course those in the old world they had domesticated animals that carry a lot of diseases and so I would guess if we looked at tear to economy as a whole then we had a bigger sample and I could maybe do this through some of the burial project there wouldn't be as quite a disease toll as an old-world city like Rome but I think yeah we also have one of the Penn State graduate students is looking at a few of these issues with the bone samples from lehenga and another extensively excavated area called Laden Tiye which is closer to the city center trying to make comparisons but we're just getting at that we have other students working on diet so like did people into hinga eat worse than people in the city center by looking at animal bones and other remains so we have some one right there and then we'll go over here any other ailment I was painted in anyway Dominus painted there's one end of the exhibit right then so they would tend to stucco them and then typically though I mean the ones I've excavated that are painted just have red pigment on it but I don't know if there's others that have different colors too it's mostly just red painted on them on the white plaster or it's just the plain stone someone back here okay um the AL meanness could you tell them tell us do they have other significance others in decorative did it point you to a certain building to go to or anything like that other al - yeah a lot of people published about what they may have meant and what their meaning was I'm rather skeptical of an empirical kind of guy and a lot of this seems speculative to me so if you see what does it all mean I mean well if it's a storm god then we know that it had some meaning relating to that deity if it's not well a different kind of meaning is what does it tell us socially what does it mean socially and in that sense they're kind of a status symbol there they not so for me they're important not for the specific symbolic content but rather that they indicate something about the people there or about the kind of building sending a message but we could only partially understand that message my second question is about the smoothers that you said you found what was the composite would that be a stone that they used to smooth that they would have carved up to use that as a tool you've been covering the building yeah the smoother is that you yeah so I mean condos came up with a really nice sort of concrete amalgam where they mixed gravel and mud and some chemical analyses suggest that they used succulent so like either agave SAP or prickly pears nopales ah as an adhesive and in fact this is what we use so now within the zone before we cover up back again with dirt our excavations they want us to use the most sort of organic local materials and so we're doing that to conserve buildings and we play around with the consistencies one thing I didn't mention its lime so lime gives you this adhesive like for cement and so yeah that they can vary so I said that that illustration I showed that those are Pumas stone you can see how pockmarked they were but that one that was in the termination deposit was like a very fine-grained basalt so the fine-grained ones might have been more for polishing or putting on the the plaster whereas the the coarser ones could have been used for more earth and materials so you have some one right here and then roll over here yeah do you want to take a look Mika's work more on population estimates but yeah we have the estimate that's now in press we estimated a hundred thousand people what we did is we looked at the excavated buildings and figure out how many households fit into an apartment compound and then we took all of those we figured out what's your median number of households in an apartment compound how much area did they take up and then we extrapolated that to the unexcavated ones which there's far more of them and use that to come up with the population estimate which and we had that we had to estimate how many people were two households we have several different possibilities sort of a low level and a high level or low level was I think 60,000 our high was about 120,000 but our our sort of middle level range that we're saying is about a hundred thousand people and the density I posted there I don't remember what's a hundred thousand divided by fifteen that was it that's the density and it's pretty high it's not the highest ever in ancient mesoamerica aspect capital tanoshii that had higher density they were on an island that really packed in but it's pretty high density for ancient mesoamerica for the two areas where I was working and this is a great point because out on the periphery what we've learned is there was a little more space and so people in the city center they're all like perfect rectangles or squares because you know you imagine those blocks were already gridded and that didn't allow people to expand in certain areas where until hinga we have areas where there's like a few different room blocks added on to the side and so they had a little more room to play with but it still it was very dense so within that one neighborhood there's 90 of these apartment compounds and they're pretty smushed together but they had a little or play between them so that can affect also like just the total architectural footprint which might be a little higher on the periphery because of that my question is actually related and and that is you gave your square footage or your size of your housing in meters but to me that translates out to between 1,800 square feet and 4,500 square feet how you mentioned that you estimated the household size how large would you say the households would be and would they be the same population per household in the larger ones or the smaller ones or is there any indication a lot of stuff last days of mesoamerica come up with a standard household size of about 5.5 5.6 people per house and that's averaged over a whole population some of which are nuclear families are smaller so much extended families in our larger and so we use several different estimates in addition to that to come up with our sort of high and low asked a bit but you know if you say there's you know that what we're saying 220 square meters or whatever that's for one household unit one batch of people family unit extended family nuclear family whatever that's one family unit and then there'll be several of those are in a compound so the compound could be sixty meters on a side and then within it there could be between the smallest might have three apartments or households within it and then the larger ones could have ten or even a dozen within it and so they they're separated with their own walls and they have their own central courtyard in it so they're the units like the apartments within the apartment compound well no so it's a smaller little bit smaller yeah so we're for that yeah we're saying the household it could it could be viewed as a really large household like some people speculate that the idea of a Cal Poly your big house actually originated at a to work on and we you know we know that the Aztecs had this ethnic designation or I'm sorry like a kinship designation of your big house and who had the big houses to akan and they were always emulating that but that's speculation speculation I can't give an answer on the al menos that's more speculative like yeah so it could that could have been considered an extended household a corporate household or some sort of term like that right and people are maintaining them and new generations are occupying them so it's a process at last centuries to come on there again these interpretations it's interesting we've developed similar interpretations coming at it from different evidence that we're not like collaborating and trying to promote a point of view I think kinds of evidence looking at it differently coming in in the same direction so we're gonna go right here and then we have someone in the back this is less a question about to talk on in particular is so much as urbanization of Mesoamerica as a whole you mentioned that traditionally there's a central urban core and then a gradual trail off of suburbs in most cities in the region how does the recent lidar findings into call where instead of that there is a solid suburban sheet between different centers change our understanding of organization in the region or even how you define what belongs to what city so like high density versus low density urbanism so the lidar results in Guatemala are showing that there was a much more contiguous low-density urban sprawl within the Maya lowlands where it seems to be more discrete and defined in the highlands and you know people have hypothesized different reasons for that does it have to do with you know defense Mitra or like are people stuck or does it have to do with resources because in say the the tropical jungle they're sort of equal distribution of rainfall and decent agricultural land over large areas of people fan out more whereas in the semi-arid area they're making things like irrigation canals or they want to be near the lakes and so they're more nucleated is one possibility if you take the edge of Tokyo continents as defined and millons map or in the spread of artifacts you get to the edge and then don't be 700 700 meters with nothing but at the Maya sites that just doesn't happen I mean there's there's no obvious edge and archaeologists argue a lot about what is the edge of how big how big is the city and this is an area of active research and discussion right now alright so we're gonna go with her and then right in the middle back there well I wonder what did the people who lived in Teotihuacan eat I know they farmed did they have foods that were grown on trees did they have trees it was an arid area did they eat anything that lived in water what were their sources of protein how did they provide adequate food and nutrition for such a large population thank you yeah great question so I mean one of the real surprise surprising things from sort of a Eurasian perspective is they're not these large animals that were domesticated in Mesoamerica in in the Andes you have Yama's and alpacas but in Mesoamerica there aren't large animals there are though turkeys hares and rabbits domesticated dogs that a tional e were consumed the lakes provided fish and so they're like with fine screening and doing the flotation samples you can find things like fish scales you can even find eggshell from quail and turkey so they're eating turkey eggs a really fascinating recent pretty recent discovery is that they're getting smoked or salted fish from Veracruz so that they were down in Veracruz they were assaulting and preparing to preserve the fish that then made it to different parts of Teotihuacan Linda Manzanilla has worked on this more from a district that she's worked in called tape on Cusco but we have some of one of my graduate students is analyzing the remains from Tinga and she has some fish bones that wouldn't have been laying species so they're coming than at quite a distance but as a whole Mesoamerican diets compared to other areas of large-scale urbanism in the pre-modern world we're little more plant focused so in addition to maize is the main carbohydrate there's what are thought of as the truth American Trinity or three sisters we're combining maize with beans for protein and squash for vitamins which also have a symbiotic relationship growing in a field so maize sucks nitrogen out of the soil and beans replenish the nitrogen to the soil and squash provides shade coverage for the group they're growing bean runners is like ingenious field cropping system that really essentially you could eat maize beans and squash with a little salt and water for the rest of your life like that could be a peasant diet in Mesoamerica there's also Ameren which were we don't know as much about as we would like so amaranth doesn't preserve as well it's you know small green and you typically wouldn't char it in the same way like if people are putting Mia's cobs in a fire to stoke it and that's how we end up getting those cobs and also the Aztecs would make amaranth balls like depicting deities and ancestors and richly consume them think of like sugar skulls and Dia de los Muertos it's the same sort of principle and the Spanish thought this is pagan we basically banning amaranth and so we know like a lot less about amaranth which is a bit you know very healthful grain of course chia-chia seed a lot of stuff you go to Jamba Juice and get your yeah a lot of those they're spirulina is comes from the lakes in Mexico so that the diet was not impoverished down there are some fruits if there's the prickly pear there's a local cherry and and then further afield they could trade for avocados that grow in in slightly warmer climates so you go with the pear and then our last question will be with the gentleman in the black hat yeah yeah yeah okay thank you so much because when I'm terrine I get lots of questions about the food and that was kind of my general idea about the three sisters but you've supplemented a lot other questions I get are about the shells that have been shaped for necklaces that look like the lower jaw and the teeth and people guess that the museum have lots of questions about those necklace ISM and that shape of the the several jaw bones that are there that aren't jaw bones that are actually shaped from from shell and then can you explain how the Teotihuacan people use the eccentrics and the city and blades and the difference between the two I know that there's a teen around those obsidian figures they have lots of questions about that but I'm really not able to answer thank you I'll start with obsidian because that's one of my favorite topics but so but for my dissertation I excavated next to the moon pyramid where there was a workshop that specialized in making lots of dark points for war so as for weapons and then eccentrics like the the silhouettes of serpents or humans and so those are just fully a ritual type deposit on the large scale so they're they made we actually even see a before tattoo akan in some formative period sites where they they like these sort of radial patterns pointing towards a pyrite mirror which would be a fool's gold reflector and so in the case of those eighteen those are the lightning bolt which is associated with the storm god plot look and then the feathered serpent so these two deities are being implicated there it with obsidian blade it's like what I'm showing that's just your basic cutting tool so that's there's no utilitarian use of metals at this time in Mesoamerican history so all of your cutting is being done primarily with obsidian and the teotihuacános lived near for very productive obsidian mines and it seems to have been central to their trade economy necklace okay your necklace so there are from the feathered serpent pyramid some that are actual human mandibles but they're the large majority are made out of shell so the assumption is that some sort of war trophy because those are so that the sacrifice is within the feathered serpent pyramid and the major like the moon pyramid not all of them but probably over 90% are males of like the age 16 to 40 they seem like warriors in some cases we have the bone chemistry suggesting they came from other parts of Mesoamerica so they you know seem to be indexing to be indexed as warriors and those could be some sort of trophy image they also have points all around them so there is a you know militaristic element to the to those offerings two questions the first one you kind of alluded to when you talked about Rome but since this is a capital area isn't the standard of living higher than you would find in other cities or towns near there and then the second one is what's being done to prevent urban encroachment on the area yeah important question so yeah certainly as like a state capital imperial capital pilgrimage site this was a place of prestige and where it does seem that standards of living were higher than elsewhere in Mesoamerica at least for a broad populace so like Maya cities at the same time you can see that the Maya Kings live very opulent lives and they were buried in very fancy tombs decked out in jade but we don't have those sorts of royal tombs so it seems like there's at least a little more distribution of resources that occurred within the city and that that might have been part of the political economic strategy of integrating diverse people so the city urbanized following volcanic eruptions and people were you know sort of moving to the city and having a more sort of inclusive state outlook could have been part of the strategy for for integrating and then as migration continued it could have also applied in terms of modern urban sprawl that's something we're working on until hinga because we're basically on the periphery of Teotihuacan was the largest city in the Americas in its day and now Mexico City is and we're out on the you know very exurbs of Mexico City and where we are it's not part of the protected zone so that's why it's why it's very important I think dig in the periphery because we are losing that area to people building houses and other construction projects so we're very consciously now working with the community and the people of San Pedro tangas the local town there and doing some you know sharing our research being in contact about you know what sort of shared interests could we have in terms of understanding what's there conserving the resources but also knowing people need to extend their families and they need to you know build sewer lines and they need to progress in the 21st century and trying to mediate those - I think that the parents are with Rome is an appropriate one and just as Rome was not just the most powerful and largest city it was militarily powerful I had the strongest economy in the Mediterranean world and had influence over huge areas and I think Tempe wakhan was the only city in the new world that is at all comparable to Rome in terms of its influence it reached throughout Mesoamerica in terms of the amount of trade its prestige and the quality of living for the people there well thank you all for coming thank you again Michael David [Applause]

Channel: Phoenix Art Museum

Views: 5,149

Rating: 4.8378377 out of 5

Keywords: teotihuacan, phoenix art museum, mexico, aztec, cultural art, ancient artifacts, phoenix, arizona, spanish

Id: CPbELYKbXcY

Length: 82min 12sec (4932 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019