The Teotihuacan Anomaly: The Historical Trajectory of Urban Design in ancient Central Mexico

Smith, Michael

doi:10.31235/osf.io/er9cd

“…At Teotihuacan, governance was highly collective, and the site had both wide streets and was built on an orthogonal grid (Smith 2017). From across the city, distances to religious activities were more accessible than at Tikal (Dennehy et al 2016:152).…”

Section: Public Goodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Governance and Leadership of Prehispanic Mesoamerican Polities: New Perspectives and Comparative Implications

Feinman¹

2018

CDN

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The principal conceptual axes for explaining variation in prehispanic Mesoamerican political organization (states and empires) have shifted over time. Current perspectives build on and extend beyond the important dimensions of scale and hierarchical complexity and have begun to probe variation in the nature of leadership and governance, drawing on collective action theory and incorporating recent findings that challenge long-held statist vantages on preindustrial economies. Recent results from and archaeological correlates for the application of this approach are outlined, offering opportunities for more comparative analyses of variation and change in the practice of governance within the prehispanic Mesoamerican world and more globally. Consideration of this variability is critical for understanding change and the sustainability of different governmental formations.

show abstract

“…Some have also chosen to abandon attempts altogether and have instead labeled all decipherment efforts as "adventurous" (Valdez Bubnova, 2014). Given the evident importance of Teotihuacan and the uniqueness of its culture and place in Mesoamerican culture-history, other researchers have turned their backs on the manifest monumental architecture (Murakami, 2010;Trigger, 1990) and have begun to weave highly unusual and as-yet-undocumented social structures, imagining Teotihuacan as a type of utopia where governance was by deliberative assembly or quadrumvirate or the like (Manzanilla, 2007;Pasztory, 1997; for a critique see Nielsen, 2014b;Nielsen & Helmke 2020;Smith, 2017). In this atmosphere, some are now suggesting that Teotihuacan writing did not record language after all, but was instead designed from the onset to convey extra-linguistic messages to a multi-ethnic population without making any recourse to language (Pasztory, 1997, pp.…”

Section: Candidate Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teotihuacan Writing:

Helmke

¹

,

Nielsen

²

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Teotihuacan, the great metropolis of the Central Mexican highlands, has often been characterized as a state without a writing system. This paper redresses this notion and provides an overview of the city’s writing system and weighs in on its state of decipherment. The corpus of texts is defined and outlined as are its media and contexts. The geographical distribution of the writing system is considered, identifying the localities that define the heartland of Teotihuacan writing and culture, as well as more distant sites and enclaves elsewhere in Mesoamerica where examples of Teotihuacan writing have been found. The temporal distribution is also appraised before going on to present the underlying graphic characteristics of the writing system, leading to an appraisal of the sign inventory, showing clear correspondences to other Mesoamerican logophonetic writing systems. A synopsis of previous work on the writing system is presented in a historical précis, before considering candidate languages of the script and features of the underlying language recorded in the writing system.

show abstract

“…Some have also chosen to abandon attempts altogether and have instead labeled all decipherment efforts as "adventurous" (Valdez Bubnova, 2014). Given the evident importance of Teotihuacan and the uniqueness of its culture and place in Mesoamerican culture-history, other researchers have turned their backs on the manifest monumental architecture (Murakami, 2010;Trigger, 1990) and have begun to weave highly unusual and as-yet-undocumented social structures, imagining Teotihuacan as a type of utopia where governance was by deliberative assembly or quadrumvirate or the like (Manzanilla, 2007;Pasztory, 1997; for a critique see Nielsen, 2014b;Nielsen & Helmke 2020;Smith, 2017). In this atmosphere, some are now suggesting that Teotihuacan writing did not record language after all, but was instead designed from the onset to convey extra-linguistic messages to a multi-ethnic population without making any recourse to language (Pasztory, 1997, pp.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2021

VL

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wibo Bakker (1974) is a Dutch design researcher and educator, specialized in design research, design methodology, and design history. Between 2014 and 2020 he was associate-professor and program-director at the Industrial Design Department of the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. Earlier he worked at several Dutch and Belgium art colleges and universities, most notably as a researcher at the Research Group Visual Rhetoric of AKV|St. Joost (Avans University of Applied Sciences) in Breda. Earlier Bakker studied graphic design at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem, and worked for several years as a designer. Later he obtained a BA and MA in Language and Culture Studies, followed by a PhD in Art History (2009) at Utrecht University, dedicated to the development of visual identity, design agencies, and modernism in the Netherlands (1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975). For this thesis he won the Jan van Gelder prize of the Dutch Society for Art Historians. It was published by 010 Publishers (Rotterdam) in the prestigious Prince Bernhard Fund for Culture 'Visual Culture in the Netherlands' series, and was also translated in Chinese. Currently he is working on a book about pictogram history and development. 2 9 3 0 Visible Language 55 . 2 Helmke & Nielsen Teotihuacan Writing: Where are We Now? No knowledgeable student of Teotihuacan art and artifacts has doubted that the Teotihuacanos had evolved a system of glyphic signs. [Yet] it has been much more difficult to sort out what rules the Teotihuacanos did observe in forming and ordering their signs, or to determine to what extent they might be said to have a writing system, compared to other Middle American peoples.

show abstract

The Teotihuacan Anomaly: The Historical Trajectory of Urban Design in ancient Central Mexico

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

The Governance and Leadership of Prehispanic Mesoamerican Polities: New Perspectives and Comparative Implications

The Governance and Leadership of Prehispanic Mesoamerican Polities: New Perspectives and Comparative Implications

Teotihuacan Writing:

Untitled

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About