Word: teotihuacan
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...bones unearthed at Teotihuacan are plenty ancient, but there's old and then there's old--and a find announced by South African scientists last week makes A.D. 150 seem like yesterday. Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand reported that they've discovered the skeleton of a human ancestor that could be as much as 3.5 million years...
...arguably the most magnificent of all belonged to a people who remain nameless. The Aztecs, who took over the area some 25 miles north of modern Mexico City in the 15th century, were convinced it was built by supernatural beings. Their name for the city, which we still use: Teotihuacan, or Place of the Gods...
With few clues to guide modern scientists, the origin and fate of the ancient rulers of Teotihuacan are a mystery to this day. But thanks to a discovery made this fall by an international research team, that mystery may finally be starting to unravel. In mid-October, archaeologists stumbled across a burial chamber deep inside Teotihuacan's massive Pyramid of the Moon. Inside they found a skeleton and more than 150 artifacts probably dating to about A.D. 150. It is, exults anthropologist Michael Spence of the University of Western Ontario, "a fantastic find...
Until the 1960s, no one realized that Teotihuacan's great Avenue of the Dead, anchored at its northern end by the Pyramid of the Moon and flanked by the even larger Pyramid of the Sun and other ceremonial buildings, was the core of a much larger metropolis. Indeed, at 8 sq. mi. and with an estimated population of 150,000, Teotihuacan was the largest city in Mesoamerica in its heyday (about A.D. 500) and one of the six largest in the world--larger even than Rome. Its political power reached all the way to Mayan city-states hundreds of miles...
Unlike its Mayan counterparts, though, Teotihuacan has yielded very few inscriptions, and those are in a hieroglyphic language that archaeologists have not yet been able to decipher. The city's celebrated painted murals don't provide many clues either. "There are very few glimpses of daily life," complains Arizona State University anthropologist George Cowgill. The best information scientists have to date comes from a series of mass graves discovered about a decade ago in the so-called Feathered Serpent Pyramid by Cowgill, his Arizona State colleague Saburo Sugiyama and Ruben Cabrera of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History...