Teotihuacan why built

Teotihuacan culture spread far beyond the city itself. Talud-tablero-style temples are found in the Maya city of Tikal, some miles away. Based on Maya inscriptions there, archaeologists think that warriors from Teotihuacan may have invaded the powerful Maya city-state in A. That and other evidence led archaeologists to surmise that Teotihuacan may have sent its armies hundreds of miles away to capture one of the jewels of Maya civilization. But relationships between the Maya and Teotihuacan were not always so violent.

But their presence is indicative of the cosmopolitan nature of Teotihuacan. The city was probably filled with people from multiple cultures in Mesoamerica , living and working together.

It also makes the question of who, exactly, the Teotihuacan people were more complex. Scholars once suggested they may have included the Toltecs, a civilization that inhabited roughly the same region as Teotihuacan for hundreds of years. Others have suggested the Totonacs, a culture about which less is known, though Totonac descendants still live in Mexico today.

Coming together in a place of safety, these refugees may have banded together to create a new city for themselves. The residents of Teotihuacan, then, may not have belonged to any particular group. Instead, they made their own, along with a new city to house them. By contrast, the Maya, along with other Mesoamerican peoples, used a formalized written script, and left thousands of inscriptions and other texts for archaeologists to study.

Also unclear is the how the city was governed. We know about the leaders of other civilizations like the Maya and the Aztec from the copious inscriptions and artwork they produced about their god-like rulers.

Teotihuacan has none of that. Clearly, puzzling facets of Teotihuacan culture remain to be answered. Scholars believe that the temple would also have served ritual and symbolic purposes. Sugiyama and her colleagues tunneled through the base of the pyramid from to They discovered a number of ritual offerings buried under roughly the center of the pyramid, including an eagle with a pyrite disk on its back.

This symbol also appeared centuries later in Aztec iconography showing an eagle carrying the world on its back. The team also uncovered a greenstone mask, and the skulls of a puma and a wolf. The Aztecs — who were the ones that dubbed the monument the "Pyramid of the Sun" — associated pumas with the sun because of the cats' golden color. Carballo says that some excavations also have uncovered braziers, incense burners and even a statue of a fire god.

Sugiyama believes the eagle was likely buried alive. The eagle sits above another tunnel, dug around the time the pyramid was built, which ends roughly underneath the pyramid's peak. Only fragments have been discovered in this tunnel, as it was looted in antiquity despite being sealed. But the chamber ends in a room that would likely have held something significant, possibly similar to the lavish artifacts found underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and Pyramid of the Moon nearby.

The Pyramid of the Sun enjoyed several centuries of prominence in Teotihuacan, and likely throughout the greater region.

But all good things eventually come to an end. Sometime between A. In the Mesoamerican world, these kinds of events were quite common. Even contemporary Maya people still practice the tradition, Carballo says.

In many spiritual traditions in the region, buildings are seen as anthropomorphized — even living — entities. The termination can occur for a number of reasons. Inhabitants themselves might burn it. Or an invading army might ritually destroy and burn monuments, talismans of power and buildings to symbolize their spiritual, as well as physical, dominance over the conquered society. Go Further.

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