First Cities of Mesoamerica: From the Olmecs to Teotihuacan

LAU I.2. First Cities of Mesoamerica 1

I.2 First Cities of Mesoamerica: From the Olmecs to Teotihuacan

Olmecs: People of the Land of Rubber............................................................................... 1 Monte Albn ....................................................................................................................... 3 Teotihuacan......................................................................................................................... 5 Bibliography, First Cities .............................................................................................. 10 Notes ................................................................................................................................. 10


Olmecs: People of the Land of Rubber In the beginning was the Topos, wrote Henri Lefebvre. Before long

before the advent of the Logos, in the chiaroscuro realm of primitive life, lived experience already possessed its internal rationality; this experience was producing long before thought space, and spatial thought, began reproducing the projection, explosion, image and orientation of the body.1

In the low wetlands near where the Usumacinta river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is today the Mexican state of Tabasco, humans had emerged from that chiaroscuro realm long before 1100 BC, and had become very conscious of how they produced space by their movements -- by running, climbing, jumping, creeping, spinning, dancing in circles, or merely looking from a particular standpoint in a particular direction. By such gestures they, like us, could place the sun and other objects to left or right, above or below, in front or behind themselves, and with each new gesture changed those relationships. And so at San Lorenzo and La Venta, and possibly other places not yet discovered, they constructed mounds, walkways, platforms, and arrangements of massive stone sculptures in ways that assured that they or their descendants would be able to reproduce the spatial experiences they most valued.

High piles of earth and stones, portals to dark, enclosed spaces, and pathways often lined with enormous stones, carved or shaped or simply chosen for their form -- were among the first large durable structures erected in North America. The piles point to the heavens, the portals mark entryways to the underground and the paths trace the lines of the heavenly bodies from solstice to solstice. Such marks consecrate the human communitys relation to the great cosmic forces, above and below, that control rain, wind, sun, death and disaster.

Their built forms demonstrate strenuous efforts to domesticate what contemporary Maya, presumed descendants of the Olmecs , describe as wild space2 and Europeans called the wilderness (in Old English wildeornes, the space of the wild beast). This is the space of wild things, where there is no discernible order and demons and chaos lurk, ready to do terrible things to humans. Humans domesticate the wild space by imposing human order, reshaping it physically and/or performing rites that neutralize its maleficence.

Hunters and gatherers arrived in the hot and humid wetlands near the Gulf of Mexico, just east of the Yucatn Peninsula, around 7,000 BC. They must have made clearings and built some kinds of shelter, but any such transformations of their environment have long since dissolved back into the jungle.

It was not until around 1100 BC that people near the Gulf of Mexico made lasting changes in their environments. Along the bank of the Coatzacoalcos River at a site today called San Lorenzo, they moved tons of earth and stone to make an artificial plateau. Atop it they placed many large stone carvings, having brought the largest stones from distant quarries. We presume they must have hauled the giant stones onto large rafts to transport through the streams and swamps. Such an operation must have required scores or even hundred of laborers, implying political leadership with wide authority, perhaps a chiefdom.


We do not know what these people called themselves nor anything more about them than we can infer from what they built. Centuries later, Nahuatl-speaking explorers from central Mexico, finding the abandoned stoneworks among the rubber trees, called these mysterious ancients Olmecatl people of the land of rubber.. We know them as Olmecs.

Further downstream, around 800 BC, in the marshy lowlands where the Tonala river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, near the mouth of the Coatzacoalcos, other Olmecs raised a conical mound of some 20,000 tons of earth and rubble, 125 m in diameter and 31.5 m high, on the small island of La Venta. Just to the north of the mound, they cleared and leveled a space that must have been a ball court, presumably played with a large, heavy ball of the locally abundant rubber. The flat playing area is marked off by two parallel banks of earth 80 m long, pointing north. Just beyond these was a rectangle area, about 300 feet wide (east-west) and 100 across. It was here at La Venta that the Olmecs perfectly defined their axial concept, culminating in a pyramidal temple with a regular base and a plaza of regular shape, flanked by low and rectangular buildings marking the only access to the pyramid. They used the talus as an architectural element, alternating it with vertical panels on the pyramids lateral faces.3

The Olmec carvers also left ceremonial stone axes, stone figures with partially human, partially feline features (were-jaguars) and four enormous basalt heads, some weighing more than 20 tons. Large, flat-topped stone blocks have variously been described as altars or, more recently (based on depictions of rulers in other, related cultures), as thrones. On the front of one of these, a stone man with powerful shoulders sits cross-legged in the cave-like entry of a stone house. His jaguar-faced crown juts up toward the houses roof, which is carved in bands that might represent thatching, or (as some scholars believe) the sky. In his hands he holds a thick stone rope, which extends around the corner of the house to a seated captive. This entire work was sculpted from a single block of basalt around 800-900 BC. That was around the time that the Greek poet Homer is supposed to have composed the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Etruscans, forerunners of the Romans, were building their first towns in Italy.

[Insert Figure 3. Olmec altar, La Venta] There is no sign of housing around these ceremonial centers. The settled

population must have lived in nearby villages in shelters of perishable materials, like many rural Maya to this day houses that quickly dissolve back into the jungle when not maintained. The high mound, the plaza and ball court, and the arrangements of massive sculptures serve no apparent practical purpose such as shelter, defense, or gathering or preparing of food. Some other need compelled the Olmecs to construct their great sites of stone.

Somebody among them must have been directing this operation a chief. And the men and/or women involved in the effort must have been free, at least for a time, from other duties such as hunting and gathering for food or fighting off other hostile groups. That there were such hostilities with other bands of humans is apparent from the sculpture of the bound captive. We can also presume that they would not have invested all that labor without a strong attachment to that particular site, to which they must have returned periodically for ceremonies. These works suggest a powerful religious commitment and a class of specialized artists. The fact that the large stones had to be brought from


afar, presumably by raft, indicates long-distance trade.4 And that is about all that we can say with confidence about these people.

What is clear is that the people who made these things were spending great effort to bring the chaos and menace of their universe under control, to domesticate the wild space. The serpent and the jaguar were the foremost symbols of the wild menace, so the Olmec imagery of men and jaguars merging in the same being is powerfully ambiguous: either the man is domesticating the jaguar by taking on its power, or the jaguar is wilding the man, drawing him back into his beastly state. The stone man squatting in the cave-like opening of the stone altar or throne at La Venta may originally have represented a flesh- and-blood chieftain with his captives, but has become more like a spirit guarding the entrance to the underworldthe lurking place of serpents and chaos. The massive stone heads convey strength, calm and wisdom, all that is orderly in human (domesticated) existence. The great mound not only organized the space around it by defining its center, it also forestalled chaos by showing the human community how it was aligned with the cosmos.

The conical mound is a forerunner of the steep, four-sided, flat-topped pyramids that would become ubiquitous in Mesoamerican settlements. Without masonry walls to retain the piled up earth, the mounds slope at La Venta could be no steeper than 35.5 Only much later, stone and cement would permit the rectangular shapes and much steeper slopes of the pyramids in the ceremonial centers of other peoples. The ball court and rectangular open space would change little in this time. All three elements mound or pyramid, plaza and ballcourt -- would appear again and again in cities built over the next 2,500 years throughout Mesoamerica. We shall see them again in Monte Albn, Teotihuacan and the Maya settlements discussed below, and finally in the great Mexica (Aztec) metropolis Tenochtitlan and its satellites, begun around AD 1400.

Monte Albn The Olmecs continued dominant in the region for about 400 years, their

trade networks and influences extending far, even up the rivers to the south and west into the highlands around the Oaxaca River, about 250 kilometers (as the hawk flies) southwest of La Venta and San Lorenzo. There the land is not only much higher but also drier and the vegetation is not as lush, which may be why it took people there longer to accumulate enough of a food reserve to support a large settled population. Somehow, though, those highland people managed to establish several large villages. A village today known as San Jos Mogote, at the base of a hill that rises 400 feet above the valley floor, grew to be the largest and most important trade center in the Oaxaca highlands; archaeological excavations of hearths and what are presumed to have been public buildings indicate as many as 1,000 inhabitants. Around 500 BC, people from this village and possibly others climbed that hill to found a new center with a commanding view of the valley. They presumably called themselves "The People" (Be'ena'a), as their descendants do today, but we know them by the name the Nahuas bestowed on them, tzapoteca or Zapotecs (people of tzapotl or sapodilla, a fruit abundant in the territory). They called their new city Danipaguache, "Sacred Mountain of Life." We know it by its Spanish name, Monte Albn.


This appears to have been the first settlement in North America to fulfill all four of the criteria that Jorge Hardoy, a noted historian of Latin American urbanism, proposed to identify a settlement as a city rather than a village or ceremonial center or something else.6 First, Monte Albn was clearly a center for the transformation of primary production, including that originating outside its immediate zone of influence. The town had areas specifically devoted to particular crafts, such as for the production of mirrors made from magnetite, suggesting an unusual social complexity and the power to attract goods from afar.7 Monte Albn had contact not only with the Olmecs of the Gulf Coast, but also with people on the Pacific Coast, the source of some exotic goods found in the village such as the stingray spines, used to draw blood from tongues or ears in ceremonial rites.

Second, as the largest and dominant settlement in the whole Oaxaca valley, it must certainly have been a center of services and a daily, periodical or occasional market place for the neighboring smaller towns and countryside. Is is easy to imagine a market place crowding the large central plaza, and goods brought from afar attest to an active trade.

Third, Monte Albn undoubtedly fulfilled a series of functions which are specifically urban, such as acting as a political, administrative, religious, cultural or military center, and incorporating the corresponding institutions. Its leaders military prowess is proclaimed in its famous relief sculptures of combat and captivity, and its cultural dominance is apparent in the ceramics and other craft goods of Monte Albn origin, or imitating its patterns, found in villages far from the center.

And finally, Monte Albn had a high percentage of resident population who also worked there and exhibited a sharp division of labor.8 We know this because, unlike the Olmecs, the people of Monte Albn built permanent residential quarters for a large population, and workshops for their various crafts.

Hardoy did not include literacy among his requirements for calling a place a city, as some scholars do. However in that regard Monte Albn also qualifies. Its people, or at least their elite, had recently begun using hieroglyphics. They also kept track of time by a system of two intermeshing calendar cycles, an early appearance of the calendrical system that came to be adopted by many different peoples all through Mesoamerica. One cycle, of obvious use for planning agricultural activities, corresponds almost exactly to the solar year; it consists of 18 periods of 20 days plus five extra (unlucky) days at the end of the cycle. The other cycle, determining dates for various rituals, was made up of 20 periods of 13 days. An especially important date would be recorded by its name and number in the 365-day cycle and its name and number in the 260-day cycle, a combination that would not be repeated for 52 years.

Monte Albn appears to have been preplanned. The main buildings and open spaces of the entire urban layout appear to have been constructed in a very short period of time, a season or two, suggesting that the whole design had been thought through and agreed upon before work began. The founders must have been inspired by what they had seen or heard of the grand centers of the Olmecs, because they faithfully reproduced, though on a grander scale, the Olmec forms of pyramid, plaza and ballcourt. However the long, independent history of development in the highlands also contributed to their urban plan.


The founders built a whole series of flat-topped pyramids, facing each other along three sides of an immense paved rectangle which in this case, because it is surrounded by large vertical structures, we can justifiably call a plaza. And like the people of the land of rubber, they also constructed with great care and skill a large ball court. [Insert Figure 4: Views of Monte Albn]

By 200 BC (if not earlier), this city dominated the villages of the whole Valley of Oaxaca, as we know from the great wealth gathered there from throughout the valley and beyond. At its apogee, between 450-700 AD, Monte Albn may have had 25,000 people. It had spread over three hilltops, the terraces on their slopes filled with houses. Each of fifteen residential subdivisions had its plaza. The main plaza atop the hill, about 160 m by 250 m oriented north-south, is flanked by a ball court, stone walls and other structures and several broad-based, truncated pyramids which give a commanding view of the valley. In the south end of the plaza is a stone platform with an unusual arrow shape, its corner pointing southwest and thus violating the strict north-south orthagonality of the rest of the layout. Archaeologists suppose it was so oriented for astronomical observations.9

The ball court is much larger than the one at La Venta, with stone bleachers for a crowd of hundreds. The play on this court could hardly have been what we understand as a sporting event, where the outcome is unknown and decided by the scoring of two teams in equal conditions. We surmise, based on what we know of games played in similar courts later in other parts of Mesoamerica, that it was an elaborate re-enactment of mythical battle of the gods. Among the Maya, the game was played between a group of nobles and their captives, who were destined to lose and then be sacrificed in order to maintain the harmony of the cosmic order.

We cannot really say how the game was played at Mont Albn, but the best-known and very conspicuous stonework at the site reinforces the hunch that it had something to do with demonstrating the military power of the citys elite. Relief carvings of contorted figures in the stone walls have been called danzantes (dancers), but closer examination shows that they represent captives, some of them mutilated. [Insert Figure 7: Danzantes in Monte Albn]

Teotihuacan While the rulers of Monte Albn were making themselves the dominant

power in the Oaxaca Valley, other large construction projects were underway in a high plateau far to the northwest. Commonly called the Valley of Mexico, the plateau and its mountain walls form what geologists call a basin, because -- unlike a river valley it has no natural drainage. Rainfall and snowmelt from the mountains collected in lagoons, the widest and deepest of which lay in the low southwestern sector, with smaller and more seasonal lagoons in other areas. The basins 7,500 square kilometers are at an average 2,240 meters above sea level, and include the largest contiguous area of flat arable land in all of Mesoamerica.10

Human groups have continuously occupied the Basin of Mexico for 25,000 or more years. However the relatively cool temperatures and aridity made it


difficult for them to produce enough food to stay in one place and to multiply. The first major built works appeared here much later than in the marshes of the Olmecs. The first villages arose where water was available year-round, along small streams or the shallow lagoons.

In 300 BC, the largest population center was in the southwestern, lowest part of the basin, where water collected in the widest and deepest lagoon of all. The people there, in a place called Cuicuilco, had built a large, stone-faced circular pyramid and many smaller sacred structures and artifacts. Perhaps a few thousand people lived from the crops cultivated in an extensive area around this center. Elsewhere, communities were much smaller. One was a village called Oztoyahualco, in the northeastern quadrant of the basin, where a small river today called the San Juan -- provided a less reliable source of water. Very near to that village, around 200 BC, some large group of people, motivated by we dont know what kind of religious fervor, laid out the rectangular base for a huge pyramid, much larger than the one at Cuicuilco. The remains of four young warriors in their finest regalia were found buried beneath each of the four corners, presumably a foundation sacrifice.11 This was the beginning of what would become the greatest city of all of North America up to that time.

No record of what its people called it has survived or been deciphered, nor do we even know what language the rulers spoke probably more than one, because it became an ethnically diverse city. Nahuatl-speakers who came across the ruins centuries after they had been abandoned found them so impressive that they called the place Teotihuacan, birthplace of the gods. They also bestowed the name Pyramid of the Sun on the massive structure that had begun the whole development, and Pyramid of the Moon on the somewhat smaller one a little to the north, and Avenue of the Dead on the grand causeway that passes before the western face of the Pyramid of the Sun and terminates at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon.

Around 50 BC, volcanic eruptions buried Cuicuilcos ceremonial center under lava and covered its farmlands with ash, thus taking that settlement out of competition with the growing community around the big construction site to the northeast. By this time the builders near Oztoyahualco had laid out a long, broad, paved walkway running north-south and passing before the western face of the great pyramid. This avenue was apparently designed to become, as it did in fact, the central axis of a much larger community. At its northern end the people built a second pyramid, almost as big as the first. This second pyramid echoes the form and, from close up, appears to rival in size the mountain in the distance behind it.

Ren Millon, the archaeologist who supervised the thorough mapping of Teotihuacan in the 1970s, has hypothesized that the construction project of the great pyramid must have been what drew people here in the first place. 12 Pasztory accepts this hypothesis, and further suggests that The Pyramid of the Sun may have been located where it is because of (1) the location of a previous shrine that was enlarged; (2) a divination or mystic occurrence like the Aztec vision of an eagle on a cactus for the future city of Tenochtitlan; or (3) a desire to move away from Oztoyahualco andwithout as yet a grand plan for the rest of the citysomething of a random or geomantically divined choice of location to the south.13


Whatever its builders original motivation, they would make this pyramid one of the two or three largest man-made structures in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. It rises 71.2 meters tall from a base 215 meters square. Only the Great Pyramid of Cholula, Mexico (55 meters tall, 450 square meters base) and La Danta in El Mirador, Guatemala (70 meters tall, on an immense platform of about 18,000 square meters) are comparable. The work required tens of thousands of laborers.

The straight, paved 5 km walkway (the Avenue of the Dead) begins south of the river and continues northerly to the Pyramid of the Moon. The elite residential complex known as the Ciudadela (citadel) on the south bank of the river was added some time between AD 100 and 200. The bridge that must once have connected the northern and southern stretches of the avenue has disappeared. [Insert Figures 6: Teotihuacan]

The wide central walkway begins south of the large walled structure now called the Citadel, which is believed to have been the residence of the ruler and his household. It runs northward up to the base of the second tallest pyramid, the Pyramid of the Moon, on its eastern side, to the right of the person ascending. About midway on his journey, the walker passes the largest pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun. The enormous stone structure of the Pyramid of the Sun was built over an earlier and much smaller sanctuary, whose shape suggests that at one time its encompassing pyramid supported twin temples upon its flat top.14

It is in this larger pyramid that we find one of the earliest examples of the talud-tablero, or slope-panel design that was imitated in other pyramids built by many other cultures throughout Mesoamerica. At regular intervals from the base to the top of the pyramid, its slope (talud) is interrupted by setbacks; each setback creates wide shelf running back to a vertical panel (tablero) that forms the back wall, above which the slope continues up to the next setback. The effect is of a stack of truncated pyramids, each higher and narrower than the one below. The setbacks form a series of platforms up to the topmost platform on the narrowest, highest pyramid. 15 Earlier versions of talud and tablero have been found elsewhere in central Mexico. In its fully developed form at Teotihuacan, it consisted of pairs of taludes and framed tableros that pass completely around a platform, and stairs flanked by balustrades that are capped with finial blocks (called remates).16 This form would eventually be emulated in areas inuenced by Teotihuacan, including the distant Maya territorie s.

While the Avenue of the Dead is clearly of great sacred significance, it also forms the axis of a grid of streets that served eminently secular, civic purposes. The grid determined the placement of other structures, facilitated movement through the city and permitted the clear delineation of neighborhoods and districts with different functions. The crossing of the north -south avenue and the east-west river was made the starting point of a grid of paved streets with regular blocks.

The city reached its peak size and complexity around AD 600, when the great Pyramid of the Sun and the 600 other pyramids, 2,000 or more apartment compounds, the workshops and market compound of Teotihuacan, spread over more than 20 square kilometers (eight square miles). Its population may have been as large as 150,000 to 200,000,17 most of them living in the apartment


complexes, which are unlike anything found elsewhere in Mesoamerica. They appear to have been designed for several households to live within a single enclosure and sharing a patio. By this time the population had sorted themselves out into different sectors clearly distinguished by ethnicity, status or occupation. The grid was punctuated by other, smaller pyramids and large masonry elite residences, thousands of masonry dwellings and workshops for commoners.

The enormous city dominated central Mexico, and its inuence spread as far as the lands of the Maya in Guatemala and Honduras. Trade goods from distant places found in Teotihuacan, and products of Teotih uacan found abroad, show that the citys commerce spread as far as the Gulf Coast, the Yucatn Peninsula and beyond. The heart of the Ciudadela complex in Teotihuacan consists of two structural and functional elements: a western pyramid (the Feathered Serpent Pyramid) and an eastern platform that supports three structures. These components form what in the Maya region archaeologists call an E -group (for its shape, the three structures extending from a common spine). It is a characteristically Maya archi tectural pattern which may have been an astronomical observatory, a public ritual complex, or an astronomical commemoration complex. The design demonstrates the multidirectional nature of interaction between Teotihuacan and the Maya. 18

Not only did Teot ihuacanese and their goods and designs travel to Maya lands, but Maya also came to and apparently even settled in Teotihuacan. A tomb excavated in Teotihuacan and dated to about AD 350 contained jade gurines from Guatemala of the sort used in Maya royal burials, suggesting that Maya nobility may have been among the foreigners resident in Teotihuacan. And in Chac, a Maya settlement in northern Yucatn, pottery and mortuary patterns typical of those associated with Teotihuacan have been found in burial sites. According to archaeologist Michael Smyth, many architectural features at Chac, including the layout of buildings and the prevalent use of serpent imagery, also indicate Teotihuacans in uence.19 Archaeologists have not yet found a ball court in Teotihuacan similar to the one at La Venta or the many others in Mesoamerica. However, a mural shows men playing another sort of ball game, using sticks rather than their bodies to strike the bal l.20

The ruling elite of Teotihuacan imposed their political system fa r abroad, in central Mexico and even into Maya territory in the south. Whether trade followed politics, or the other way around, the city imported raw materials from other areas, transforming them into manufactured goods which were then traded throughout Mesoamerica.21 Not only the goods, but the craftsmen and traders from other parts came to Teotihuacan and, apparently, settled there. There may have been an inner city for the elite and an outer city for foreigners. In any case, the Oaxaca section, the only positively identied barrio of foreigners in Teotihuacan, is outside the central area.22

Then in a short period of time around AD 750, nearly a thousand years after its founding, the great city was invaded and burned by less urbanized people and the surviving urbanites ed or were carried off. One cause, probably the main cause, of this disaster must have been the severe 30-year drought in the basin of Mexico that lasted from AD 736 to 765. This would have weakened the citys ability to feed its own population and to resist the hungry barbarians at its gates.


Some of the refugees from Teotihuacan must have ed to Xochicalco and other smaller communities nearby, where they fought over scarce resources, but other survivors moved further away away. Some of them resettled about 50 kilometers to the southwest, to w here rainwater and snowmelt from the mountains collected in a system of interconnected lakes and swamp and not far from the ruins of Cuicuilco, abandoned some 800 years earlier. This lakeside area would become the base for a new urban empire that would r each its peak some 600 years after the fall of Teotihuacan, and would give the Basin of Mexico its name.

Meanwhile, the sudden disappearance of Teotihuacan also shook another great cultural system whose fate was intertwined with that of the great city, the Maya of distant Yucatn, Chiapas, Honduras and Belize.


Bibliography, First Cities

Notes 1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Production de lespace. 2 Karl Taube (personal communication, August 1994) points out that modern Yucatec Maya conceptualize space as domesticated versus wild, a point also recently made by Stone (1995:15-17), reports Webster, David. "Classic Maya Architecture: Implications and Comparisons." In Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, edited by Stephen D. Houston, 5-48. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998, P.29. Cf. Stone, Andrea. Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Buildings may have been "alive" from the Maya perspective. [Stone, Andrea. 1995. Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting. Austin: University of Texas Press.]Webster, Classic Maya Architecture: Implications and Comparisons. 3 Hardoy, Two Thousand Years of Latin American Urbanization. 4 Sabloff, The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World. 5 Stierlin, The Maya: Palaces and Pyramids of the Rainforest. 6 Hardoy, Urban Planning in Pre-Columbian America. 7 Sabloff, The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World. 8 Hardoy, Urban Planning in Pre-Columbian America. 9 Sabloff, The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World. 10 Pasztory, Teotihuacan. 11 Ibid. 12 Millon, Social Relations in Ancient Teotihuacn . 13 Pasztory, Teotihuacan. 14 Millon, Social Relations in Ancient Teotihuacn. 15 Stierlin, The Maya: Palaces and Pyramids of the Rainforest. 16 Laporte, Architectural Aspects of Ine raction between Tikal and Teotihuacan. 17 Millon, S ocial Relations in Ancient Teotihuacn. 18 Laporte, Architectural Aspects of Ineraction between Tikal and Teotihuacan. 19 Excavations Challenge Views of Maya Development in Yucatn. 20 Millon, Social Relations in Ancient Teotihuacn. 21 Hardoy, Two Thousand Years of Latin American Urbanization. 22 Millon, Social Relations in Ancient Teotihuacn.

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First Cities of Mesoamerica: From the Olmecs to Teotihuacan