In City of the Gods, War Was a Way of Life

A series of discoveries by a Japanese archeologist is shattering the long-held belief that the inhabitants of Mexico’s mysterious Teotihuacan -- the City of the Gods -- were a peaceful people who managed to build a metropolis without having a warlike despot typically associated with vast empires.

Instead, excavations of several structures have shown that the people of Teotihuacan (pronounced TAY-oh-TEE-wa-CON), whose origin and ultimate fate are unknown, were as warlike as their Mayan contemporaries, and the Aztec and Inca who came after them.

Digging inside the massive edifices of the city, archeologist Saburo Sugiyama has unearthed the bodies of hundreds of bound captives, indicating that the city’s rulers were well-versed in mayhem.

Last month inside the Pyramid of the Moon, Sugiyama found the first burial site for high-level officials ever discovered in the city. It was not the grave of a king, but certainly that of priests or other administrators. “Nobody has ever found anything like this” at Teotihuacan, he said, adding that the discoveries may change forever how the city is viewed.

Through the centuries, Teotihuacan has remained one of the most impenetrable mysteries of Mesoamerica.

At its peak, the city -- about 30 miles north of Mexico City -- covered at least 8 square miles, making it larger than Imperial Rome. Its estimated population of 150,000 exceeded that of Washington, D.C., during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, about 1,300 years later. It was the largest city in the New World during its ascendancy and one of the largest in the world.

Yet remarkably little is known about it.

Archeologists cannot read the Teotihuacanos’ writings -- and are not even sure whether the inscriptions they have seen are, in fact, writings. They don’t know who built the city, what they called themselves, how they spread their control over much of Mesoamerica, or why they abruptly disappeared in the 7th century, 800 years after the city’s birth. The abandoned city and its monuments were given their current names by the Aztecs, who discovered the remnants when they moved into the region in the late 1400s and were convinced the city had a supernatural origin.

Sugiyama’s recent discoveries have begun to unveil a tiny piece of the city’s culture. In addition to the bodies of three officials, the tomb contained jade objects -- from as far away as the Motagua Valley of Guatemala -- carved in Mayan style, including a spectacular jade statuette of a person with relatively realistic features and big eyes. Such objects were typically used as a symbol of rulers or royal family members in Mayan society.

“The offerings strongly suggest a direct relation between the Teotihuacan ruling group and the Mayan royal families,” Sugiyama said. “For the first time, we have data indicating a Mayan royal class connection at Teotihuacan, from the heart of one of the city’s major monuments.”

Scientists previously found evidence of Teotihuacan influence in Mayan and other cultures, but this discovery marks the first evidence that cultural influence moved in the opposite direction.

“The archeological evidence appears to point toward Teotihuacanos intervening in Mayan politics,” said archeologist George Cowgill of Arizona State University, one of the foremost experts on the city.

“But many people still dispute that there was really any significant influence because they were two distinctly different cultures. Dr. Sugiyama’s discovery makes it all more complicated by adding some big new pieces to the puzzle. It certainly makes it harder to see the Maya as not much influenced by Teotihuacan.”

What has long puzzled archeologists are the widespread pictures of plants, animals, commoners and gods on monuments in the city. The images have led many researchers to speculate that it was a peaceful, pastoral culture, ruled not by mighty kings but by the collective will of the people -- a kind of Athens of Mesoamerica. The lack of inscriptions on the monuments, it has been suggested, reflects the absence of strong leaders driven by a need to glorify their reigns.

“It is a mystery,” says archeologist Ruben Cabrera of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. “Why didn’t they depict rulers?”

Historian Esther Pasztory of Columbia University in New York suggests Teotihuacan was an egalitarian republic markedly different from contemporaneous civilizations. Her 1997 book, “Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living,” argues that the people of Teotihuacan refrained from glorifying rulers because they wished to create the image of an integrated community.

Pasztory says researchers such as Sugiyama and Cowgill are trying to force the city into a single-ruler model that is more comfortable for them. “The model is something like ancient Egypt, but Teotihuacan is not Egypt. It is a very special place,” she said.

But Sugiyama and others argue that the absence of textual inscriptions is a reflection of the cosmopolitan nature of the city. In recent years, archeologists have shown that the city’s residents included Pacific Coast Zapotecs, Mayans and other nationalities, as well as the indigenous population.

“In a cosmopolitan city, one language isn’t going to be understood by everyone, so symbolic images are easier to understand,” Sugiyama said.

Sugiyama’s Japanese ancestry might seem to make him an unlikely candidate to decipher a Mexican city’s past. When he first came to Mexico in 1979, he didn’t speak any Spanish and his only knowledge of the country came from books. But those books had triggered an intense interest in Mexican history and culture -- especially that of Teotihuacan -- and he has been working there ever since, either as an associate with Mexico’s National Institute, as a professor at Arizona State or in his current position at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan.

He made his first major discovery in 1983, while digging around the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, a smaller structure a little more than a mile south of the Pyramid of the Moon. He unearthed a massive burial site containing 18 sacrificed men, the first evidence of such ruthless behavior. The men were dressed as soldiers and buried with obsidian-tipped spears and other weapons.

In an effort to discover why the men were sacrificed -- perhaps as an offering to a god, or maybe to commemorate the death of a ruler -- Sugiyama, Cowgill and Cabrera in 1988 began tunneling into the temple. They immediately found the remains of about 200 more warriors, most buried with their hands behind their backs as though they were bound.

Continuing their excavation toward the center of the temple, the team was shocked to intersect a jagged tunnel. Following it to the center, they found the remains of 20 more sacrificed soldiers. Disappointingly, they also found three large pits that had apparently been emptied by looters.

“There might have been one or two tombs of rulers,” Cowgill said. “We don’t know. I suspect that’s what it was, but we don’t have the hard evidence.”

Ten years later, convinced that the pyramids must have been burial sites for royalty, Sugiyama and Cabrera turned to the Pyramid of the Moon, a massive structure 450 feet by 420 feet wide at the base and more than 120 feet tall.

Because the pyramid was built in as many as seven successive stages, its interior is filled with a mixture of boulders, rocks and loose soil. The possibility of collapse makes the tunneling slow going: The team is lucky if it can dig and reinforce a yard of tunnel in a day. But the same conditions may very well have kept out looters.

In 1999, the pair discovered a burial chamber with a wealth of artifacts, including greenstone statuettes, figurines fashioned from obsidian, obsidian knives, mirrors, two jaguars in a wooden cage and seven large birds.

The chamber held only one body, and the team initially thought it had finally found a ruler. But when the skeleton was fully excavated, it was found to have been buried with its hands behind its back, as though bound. The body was also unadorned.

The team had more luck this year. Digging in a level dating from about AD 350, corresponding to the construction of the sixth stage of the pyramid, Sugiyama and Cabrera found another burial chamber, this one with three bodies.

“Unlike the earlier burials we’ve discovered in the Pyramid of the Moon, these three bodies didn’t have their hands tied,” Sugiyama said. “In addition, they were found in a cross-legged seated position, which is very rarely, if ever, found in burials here.

“The position can, however, be seen in images in murals, sculptures or figurines of priests, gods and warriors in Teotihuacan and other related sites.”

Similar body positioning has been found in burials of Mayan elite.

The three bodies are all male and are estimated to have been about 50 at the time of burial. All three bodies were lavishly adorned. “They have the richest ornaments ever found in a burial at Teotihuacan after more than a century of research,” Sugiyama said.

The bodies were also surrounded by offerings of very high quality. “If we had found only one of these bodies, we would suspect that he had been a ruler or at least a royal family member, but we discovered three,” Sugiyama said. “That leaves us with critical questions of identification that still need to be resolved.”

Sugiyama thinks the presence of the bodies suggests there is a royal tomb nearby. But that discovery, if it is there, will have to wait until next year. In mid-October, he had to close the site and return to his teaching job for the fall semester.