Ep. 8: Explore Teotihuacan w/ Noah Brendamour

This week our first returnee, Marshall student Noah Brendamour, joins us once again to discuss the great city of Teotihuacan. Make sure to listen as we explore the layout out of the city and those who inhabited it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome everyone back to the History Over Coffee Podcast, brought to you by Marshall University and Norse by God. I'm your host, Tyler Leonard. I am a Marshall History grad student, and today we are joined by our first returnee, Noah Brendamore. Why don't you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hi, Tyler. I am Noah Brendemore.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

I'm a history undergrad at Marshall University. My general like love of history is uh Central America and a lot of the cultures and cities that span it.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

And what will you be discussing today?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Uh I'll be talking about Teotihuacan, which is probably tied for my favorite city in human history. Um it's uh an amazing city. It first started rising in the first century CE in the Valley of Mexico. Um it would end up being one of the single largest cities of the pre-industrial uh age worldwide in general. Uh at its peak, it housed roughly, I'd say, about 100,000 people. I mean, at this time of it of Teotihuacan's life, only a few cities were you know as populated as it was. The ruins of the city are still very beautiful, and it's one of the single most, if not the most, visited archaeological site in both North and South America. I mean, it left an economic, uh, cultural, a political, and a religious legacy that all of Mesoamerica would, you know, just be connected to for centuries to come after its eventual decline.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Awesome. So why don't you start by kind of laying out the infrastructure, the population, maybe the region that Tehuotihuacan is located in?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, so um Teotihuacan was uh it sits in the northeast corner of the Valley of Mexico in the Teotihuacan Valley. Um at this time in history, the Valley of Mexico, which is where Mexico City is now, was dominated by Great Lakes. Uh, I want to say three major ones, if I'm remembering off the top of my head, and several smaller ones. Uh, they were all drained for the actual construction of uh Mexico City. But uh prior to the first century BCE, the site that would become Teotihuacan was just a small farming community. It didn't have any actual power in the area, and the geography of the city itself was actually pretty underwhelming. Uh the valley of Teotihuacan isn't very fertile. Much better farming land can be found south of this area. In the basin uh south, it received about twice as much rainfall. The northern basin where Teotihuacan was was dominated by a very salty and brackish Lake Texcoco, while people in the south uh enjoyed fresh water from uh Lake Sochi Mikau. Um, although the San Juan River and several natural springs in the area did provide fresh water to the city, so they weren't completely without it, but it was not an impressive start for such an immensely powerful city that it would become. Um I already mentioned it, but at its height, the city would gain around 100,000 people. Uh this and that would be its height, and it would rest at that for a long time. Uh, to the southern areas I mentioned before with the better farming land was the city of Hue Kulco. Um, it would be it was the dominant power of the time, and it would uh be the main rival to a very young Teotihuacan. It's a very impressive site in its own right, and as a rounded pyramid, um, it housed around 20,000 people, and uh it was the main rival for the young Teotihuacan, but it didn't survive very long, not through any action of its own, but a series of eruptions in that southern area would ruin much of the fertile land that the city was built around, and much of its population and the population of other nearby cities would start moving north, and they would find a new home in Teotihuacan. Uh, there is also some evidence of environmental uh change with the rainfall in the area that may have made these problems even worse. But regardless of the reason, the mass migration began about 150 BC to 200 CE from that southern area to the site of Teotihuacan. Uh, this allowed the city to swell to its defense sizes, and uh, I mean, it was, I mean, this would have been an immense population migration, and the city did really well to actually uh cope with this massive influx. Um, the Teotihuacana leadership, seeing this incoming population, uh, needed a plan for city expansion, and they did a phenomenal job of it. Um, the city is laid out on an orthogonal grid. This is uh very interesting because no other city in Mesoamerica had been laid out like this, at least to our current knowledge, this was the first time that it had ever happened. Uh, and even after this point, it wasn't a very common thing to see. At this point in time, it was the first in Mesoamerica, and it was a very, even today in modern design choice. Uh, this design was so important to the systems that they actually diverted the San Juan River so that its course ran parallel to the grid. Um, notably, this grid is also not laid out on a north-south axis, but it's at an axis of 15.5 degrees east of north. Uh, this orientation isn't by any amount a mistake. Uh, it's believed by archaeologists who study the site that the architects took into the account the setting of the sun on August 12th and April 29th uh when making this grid and deciding on how they were going to angle it. Uh, if you're familiar with astronomy, this might be confusing. These uh days are not on an equinox or solstice, but they are 260 days apart, which is the length of the sacred calendar in Mesoamerica. So even the orientation of the city was built honoring this calendar. Uh many other things in the city, like the pyramids are also of the city, are also built with this number styles in mind. Uh like the large pyramid of the sun measures 250 Teotiocano units, which is double 260, or 250, which is double 260. Um, so even like the basic construction of the city is built with this in mind. Uh, when the city was mapped, uh I think it was the 1960s, it was discovered that most of the city was made up of these like walled apartment compounds. Uh, these replaced any of the urban dwellings that might exist in the city before, and they allowed the city to accommodate this new arriving and dense population. Um, a typical compound would center around an open courtyard that would have a small ritual space and about a dozen rooms with several specialized spaces for like crafts. Uh, a lot of these compounds actually housed workmen uh in their own home. So people who were making pools and weapons out of obsidian, butchers, pottery, creators, textile mills, all this was run out of these compounds in a lot of cases. Um, windows weren't all that common, uh, although some of them, some of these compounds did have open roofs, which is very interesting to me. Um these compounds could vary in size. On the smaller end, they were about 400 square meters. Some of the largest ones would be upwards of 7,000 square meters. Uh, nearly all citizens had decorations in their home, some of which survived to the modern day. Uh, some of these places even had indoor plumbing for waste removal, which was insane when I first learned it. Um, these apartments are some of our best sources of information about what daily life was like in Teotihuacan. And it's really, really interesting for about, I think, three reasons personally. One of the first and most interesting to me is that with the survival of decorations and tools and items and the burials that took place in these areas, we uh I say we as if I did this, but the archaeologists were able to find that there was uh the presence of ethnically distinct neighborhoods, kind of like how there's Chinatown or like Little Italy, Teotihuacan had its own like ethnic areas like this. There was Zapotec and Mayan, uh the Gulf Coast. Uh, you know, they all had their own neighborhoods, and you can still find those burials there. And uh I think that's just very interesting because from its inception, Teotihuacan was a very diverse um city from just the moment it began. And it's a really interesting and cool example that like all of these cultures that we talk about, all these different civilizations, they weren't isolated, they interacted with each other, they migrated. It was it's just very interesting to me. It's very cool. Um, I already mentioned just the sheer amount of craft production that was being done out of these places, which is also very interesting to me. Uh, one of the things that I find very interesting when looking at these places as well is that it's clear that the quality of life enjoyed by a Teotihuacano citizen was so much higher than that of like the average citizen in most of the rest of Central America, or even just like around the world. They had a they had an immensely high quality of life. They had, you know, almost every commoner or peasant of Teotihuacan, however you want to phrase it, had access to a personal space and luxuries that, you know, were usually only allowed to elite in other places. Um, you know, not like the most crazy things, but I mean they had high quality goods, and some of them even had imported items, even if they were simple items, they were still high quality at that. Um, and that was just, you know, insanely interesting and about this city, and it goes to show just how powerful, how productive, how strong its economy really was, and how much it was able to build to support this type of quality of life, or even its like common class.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

To interject really quickly, I know you talked about the orthogonal grid being sort of a unique aspect of the city. Was the city standard of the time, or were they doing a lot of things that would be considered unique when looking at other cities? Like, are the apartment buildings that you talked about, or were those like a common staple of these cities, or was this kind of like a very unique experience?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

So the orthogonal grid was unique. Like I said, it was the first example that we've ever found of it, and it wasn't very common even after this point, and it allowed the city to expand very orderly um in a very measured way. As for the apartment complexes, I do not personally know of them being very common in other places. I know of similar examples, but I don't off the top of my head know of any that are the same as the ones that are found in Teotihuacan. Um, at least not during this time period. Uh later, Mesoamerica is a different um is a different answer. But at this time period, this was a very unique thing they were doing, to the best of my knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

So you would say at this period, this was probably one of the more unique cities that were developing.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah, it was a uh it was a very unique city. Um not only just for you know where it was being as powerful as it was, the fact that, you know, its working class households had access to high quality goods, the fact that it just had such like the the sheer military power of Teotihuacan allowed it to um expand its like sphere of influence all the way down into the you know the Yucatan Peninsula and to some of the Guatemalan highlands from Mexico City, even though they never conquered outside of their area. They didn't you know form an empire. Um, I mean, those were all amazing reasons to want to immigrate to Teotihuacan if you live nearby. That that quality of life, that uh you know, security, all those things were you know just incredible.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Discussing kind of the layout of the city, I know you mentioned a pyramid or two earlier. Were there any more notable buildings or landmarks in the city? And I'm unaware if the city had sort of a center, but was there something that the city was built around, like in the center of the city?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah, uh it's actually very, very interesting. So there are three main pyramids in the city that everyone that knows about this place uh really thinks about. There is the uh pyramid of the moon, the pyramid of the sun, and the pyramid of the feathered serpent. Um these pyramids are the main avenue. Uh they're all kind of on a main drag that, if I'm remembering, is uh called the walkway of the dead. And it is the main drag through the center of the city where you have at one end uh with the mountain that nearby is in the background, you have the pyramid of the moon. You have to decide on its uh if I'm facing the pyramid of the moon, head on, it tend to be to my right is the pyramid of the sun, and then at the other end of the walkway, also on the right side, you'd have the pyramid of the feathered serpent. I think I remembered all of that correctly. I apologize if I'm mixing up where they are, but I believe that is correct. But those are the three main pyramids. There were other smaller pyramids, there were other large structures, there were courtyards, um, there were these large platforms um that like in front of the pyramid of the sun, at the front of the pyramid of the sun, there's a large platform that was used for ceremonies, uh, there's large graziers, um, you know, like there was just this city was dense and filled with tons of constructions. These are just the three most famous ones.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Do archaeologists and historians, are they aware of any sort of recreation that might have occurred inside the city, i.e., sports events, anything to do with like water events, anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Um, so for water events specifically, I do not know. Uh, I've never heard of anything like that. Um, so I cannot say. Um, but this is another very interesting thing about Teotihuacan very specifically, is that uh there was no ball course. Mesoamerica and a lot of the American area had a ball game. Uh the Aztecs, minds, all of them played it. And it for a lot of them even played into their spiritual and religious beliefs. Uh, it was so ingrained in their culture. Uh surprisingly, Teotihuacan does not have a formal ball court. Not that there aren't places that the game could have been played, either it was absolutely played. There's just no way it wasn't. But surprisingly, this is one of the few like major massive cities like this that has no formal ball court.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Interesting. Um, I know you brought up kind of the leadership of the city. What did that look like? Do we know who was in charge? Is it sort of like a in a modern day sense, what sort of political or leadership system does it most closely replicate?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

So that's actually a really great question that no one can agree upon. Um, so the city of Teotihuacan is undoubtedly, it was immensely powerful. The fact that it could, you know, organize this large-scale construction, the fact that it could protect that it could project its power so far, uh, the fact that it was so prosperous has led many people to different conclusions. Um, and the main reason is we don't know. Within the city, there is no clear palace, like we would expect. Um, one of the leading archaeologists, uh, Sudiyama, uh, he believes that Teotihuacan was ruled by a king, and many people still do. We have some uh examples of other uh nearby groups like the Mayans mentioning like powerful leaders from Teotihuacan, but they're never specifically referred to as like the sole king. Um and there are flaws in this theory. Uh, as I said already, there is no actual palaces uh in the city that are like definitively we would see as a royal palace. There's no art in Teotihuakon that depicts rulers specifically. And this is in direct contrast to what we see with the Mayan uh during the same period, where they have monuments to their kings and rulers. Um there is multiple like calatial residences, um, but none that could that that like is definitively like what we'd expect of royalty. Uh and there are elaborate burials that have been found in Teotihukan, but there's never been any royal burials that would, you know, show us that there was a king. So if kings did rule the city, um, we are not necessarily certain. Uh other people have proposed that there was a far more complex representative system of government. Um, Linda Manzanilla uh has proposed that Teotihukan was divided into quarters and that each quarter would have produced a leader and they would have been a part of a ruling council. She points to the collective nature of life in the city, the egalitarian living conditions, looking back at the apartment compounds, people are not living separately but in groups. So there she figures that there's a sophisticated society organized at the very bottom of Teotihucon, society going all the way up. Uh, and I just want to point this out. Regardless of whether I or what anyone else personally thinks, whether you think TeotihuCon did have a king or whether you agree that it did have some sort of ruling council, neither of these two uh, you know, archaeologists, these two doctors that I just pointed out are upstars. They are both highly respected. Each of these two have decades of experience working at Teotihucon and both are massive voices in the field of its study. Um, and they still have this massive disagreement on how they think the city is ruled. And I mean, that that just goes to show you how difficult it is to get a clear answer about how the city's, you know, uh government truly works.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

You talked about this being a very prosperous city, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you said at the beginning that they didn't have a large access to a fresh water source. So I'm curious as to how sort of the agricultural aspect of the city looked. Were they bringing stuff from outside of the city or did they have enough access to fresh water to sustain?

SPEAKER_01 13:57

So initially, they focused their agriculture around the springs and the San Juan River. Uh, they would eventually start creating irrigation systems uh to grow plants, um, you know, maize, uh cactus, cactus fruit, things like that. Um, they did bring food from outside the city with their trade. Like I mentioned before with the uh compounds, Teotihuacan was just such an insanely industrious city. It produced some of the best, it also produced green obsidian weapons and tools. It produced amazing pottery, it produced textiles. Um, you know, the city was just so economically powerful that it could bring stuff in. Uh it made a lot of polka, which was a if which was an alcoholic beverage that was part of most people's diets. Um they domesticated animals. Uh let me see, I have a list of which ones were specifically used. Uh there was a very in this, to be fair, there was a very large reliance on this because while they did have the agriculture and they didn't bring food in, they had polka as a drink. Um they also forged for plants and they hunted, but there was a very large reliance on this domestication, particularly of dogs, of turkeys, uh, of jackrabbits, and of cottontails that were bred for consumption in the city as a food source.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

And I know you mentioned earlier of a rival city. Did uh the city have to worry about fighting? Were they going out and fighting people? Uh was there sort of tensions between other cities?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

I mean, of course, but Teotihuacan was the Central American powerhouse. It was the largest, and it was for, you know, after for about 100 to 150 years, it was just the it was the most powerful thing on the continent. Um it began a it never really had another true rival, to the best of my knowledge, that could like truly contend with it. Like I said earlier, it managed to Teotihuacan managed to like project its military power all the way into the Yucatan Peninsula and it influenced mined city-states. It put kings in power there that was friendly with them. Um after the end of that like 100, 150 year peak, the city slowly began to decline around 450 to 500 CE. Um, you I mean, we can see the signs of this decline. Luxury goods and burials in the city became rarer. Um, and I mean, you could see this decline happening. Uh, although, make no mistake, even during its decline, the city was still a force to be reckoned with. It still had an insanely large population. But it appears that there was a disparity in wealth that was growing. Drought and soil erosion, along with um assumed deforestation, likely made the environment harder for the city to produce food with. Um, all of this seemed to have like really jumped ahead around 550 or 650 CE with a climate event. Um not a climate event, climatic event, sorry, uh, where it seems that like all the civil ceremonial centals were burned, artwork was destroyed. We don't fully know the cause of this. Many theories have appeared as to why the city seemed to have done this foreign invasion revolution or political upheaval. We're not fully certain, we don't really have absolute answers, but whatever happened, this was the like end of the city's heyday, and it accelerated its decline. The city wasn't abandoned at this point, and it still pushed on for a few more centuries, but in a diminished state with a population of usually sitting around 20,000 to 30,000 people. Um, and I mean, even with its population this low, it was still a lot of people. I mean, it was a great city still, people still knew it, but it was no longer the seat of a great power like it had once been. Um, eventually we'll see a change in ceramic styles that show that new migrants were starting to come in and the wake of the city's collapse as its uh, you know, very famous material culture started to dry dry up. And this phase carries on into the post-classic period. But um, at this point, I would say the city really was done, and in its, you know, in its demise, other cities started to rise to fill this power vacuum. Um even with its death, you know, its decline, its abandonment, the city was still very honored. It left a huge influence on the later cultures of Mesoamerica. The Aztecs, particularly, had a very special reverence of the city, and Montezuma II used to make regular pilgrimages there. Uh, the Aztec religion specifically places the city of Teotihuacan as the center of creation from where everything was made. Um, so even with its eventual decline after this just powerhouse of the city went down, um, it was still a very honored, important piece of Central America, even when it was no longer inhabited.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Are you aware of how the discovery of the city in modern times came about, or was it just one of those cities that had such a long-standing history that it was kind of easy to come about and find?

SPEAKER_01 17:29

So, I mean, it was it wasn't hidden at all. The city's too large. The pyramid, like the pyramid of sun is one of the single largest pyramids on the planet. It was too large. You can see it from uh Tenochtitch-Tetlan. Uh, so you know, any of the conquistadors would have been able to see it from anywhere that was like still populated that they were visiting in the area. Um, it had always been known. Um, interestingly enough, uh, one thing is that it is still a UNESCO World Heritage site today, which is really good. Um, it's being preserved today as uh development nearby was threatening it. So uh I'm very happy that it is still a site today like that, but it's been known for about as long as it's existed. It's an impossible thing to ignore both in size and influence.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

I'm curious, have you ever had the chance to travel to Central America, or is that something that's on your list of things to do?

SPEAKER_01 18:08

I have traveled to Central America. Uh, I have not had the pleasure of visiting the site. I desperately want to. I've seen some other sites, but I've not had the pleasure of going here.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Awesome. Well, I want to turn it over to you really quick. If there's any other cool information or important information you think that you have on the city?

SPEAKER_01 18:23

I mean, there's just so much I can still talk about. I barely scratched the surface. Um there's just so many immensely interesting things talking about their pottery and their art. Teotihuacan has such an immensely powerful art uh and pottery, like the culture that was left uh in Central America.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Is the the artwork does it incorporate other art styles that we see at that time, or is it unique and did other cities and places incorporate the city?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

It was pretty unique, I would say. Um you don't it it's one of those things where if you see it and you know about art of that region, you can tell that it's a Teotihuacano piece instead of a different regions. They created their own style um that would go on to be very recognizable against uh its later styles and against uh that of their neighbors.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Well, it's always great to see a historian or a student or just a person be so passionate about something, and uh we can definitely have you back on at any time to continue this discussion. But to kind of wrap things up, I wanted to ask you if you could go back in time and discover any one thing. It could be a burial site, it could be a theory, it could be some sort of scientific observation. What's one thing you would want to go back and be the discoverer of?

SPEAKER_02 19:53

That's that's hard. Um that's really difficult.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

I think like a large part of me would just want to go anywhere in Central America and like see some of the ceremonies and like record them. If I'm going for like solve a mystery, if only so that I can stop listening to like online conspiracy theories, I would go and like record exactly what happened to like Mark Anthony and Cleopatra so that I can stop seeing like annoying conspiracy theories about it.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

No, I didn't even think about that aspect of you being able to solve.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah, it's like I resolved discussions. Like, please stop talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Well, like I said, I appreciate you joining us today. This podcast is again brought to you by Marshall University and Norse by God. You can visit Norse by God on Facebook, Instagram, or the website NorsebyGod.com. You can also visit Marshall's history department on Instagram, and we will see you next week.