The Teotihuacan Anomaly: The Historical Trajectory of Urban Design in Ancient Central Mexico

Abstract

Abstract:The ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan had the most aberrant design of any city in ancient Mesoamerica. I examine similarities and differences between the design of Teotihuacan and other Mesoamerican cities. During the Preclassic period, a set of common Mesoamerican planning principles emerged. The designers of Teotihuacan rejected most of these principles in favor of a new and radical set of planning concepts. After the fall of Teotihuacan, subsequent urban planners ignored the Teotihuacan principles and returned to ancient Mesoamerican planning ideas. Elements of the Teotihuacan plan did not resurface until the Mexica of Tenochtitlan revived them for a specific goal. The historical sequence of central Mexican city layouts highlights the anomalous character of Teotihuacan's principles of urban design within the canons of ancient Mesoamerican urbanism.

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“…It maintained an ideology that glorified militarism and likely conquest. Understanding Teotihuacan's system of governance has been a challenge for archaeologists, but archaeologists have proposed theories of some form of cooperative, collective, or even democratic organizational structure for decades (e.g., Blanton et al, 1996;Cowgill, 2015;Manzanilla, 2015;Pasztory, 1997;Smith, 2017).…”

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“…While the city's grid design implies strong governance, this does not allow us to infer whether it was centralized or collective in nature: both options are empirically attested elsewhere. What is known is that in terms of its design, Teotihuacan was unique in the sense that it was without precedent and successor among Mesoamerican cities (Smith 2017). Palaces in particular were common and readily identifiable in other Mesoamerican cities from at least the early first millennium CE onward, whereas Teotihuacan may well have lacked them entirely, just as it lacked the otherwise ubiquitous ball courts.…”

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“…Аргументом в пользу является широкий ареал распространения материальной культуры города и влияние на ряд отдаленных регионов, к примеру, майя низменностей. Любопытным фактом является то, что никакой другой известный город не имел такой структуры как Теотиуакан, за исключением Теночтитлана -крупнейшего города ацтеков [19].…”