Water Temples and Civil Engineering at Teotihuacan, Mexico

Abstract

Archaeological imagination [is] finding new ways of asking questions that link the most empirical of research projects with innovative social theory.

Intensive Agriculture and Early Complex Societies of the Basin of Mexico: The Formative Period

“…As subgroups begin to cooperate across tributaries, this can expand to an entire woodshed without centralized management. Carballo points out that this is very similar to the process Angulo (1987) hypothesizes for Teotihuacan once the final grid orientation was determined and Teotihuacan engineers rerouted and canalized the San Juan and San Lorenzo rivers to conform to it (Evans and Nichols 2016;Nichols 2015).…”

“…He further speculated that canalization for chinampas inspired Teotihuacan's grid. But the channelization of the San Juan and San Lorenzo rivers as they traversed the heart of the Early Classic city, along with rerouting of numerous smaller drainages and streams to conform to the urban grid with its calendric associations suggests to me that this is unlikely (Evans and Nichols 2016;Sugiyama 1993). McClung de Tapia (2012a) cites some recent hints that the drained fields may date to the Colonial period.…”

“…Having large numbers of farmers living in the city and in apartment compounds, along with rerouting streams and rivers to accommodate the city's grid, made agricultural resources and labor part of the new state's order. This order also linked rulers to forces of water, renewal, and rain, and to Teotihuacan as a sacred place (Evans and Nichols 2016;Millon 1992:382).…”

Sociopolitical organization, landscape change, and hydraulic engineering in the Teotihuacan Valley, Mexico: 1250 B.C.–A.D. 1810

“…We should no longer assume that maize was king, nor that there was a king—be it a dominant crop or human autocrat controlling hydrology and subsistence—at specific points in the valley's history. While water and hydraulic engineering are clearly central to Classic‐period Teotihuacan ideology and political legitimacy (Evans & Nichols, ), the iconographic and archeological evidence does not yet paint a detailed portrait of what the socio‐hydrological and political landscapes themselves were or how they developed. Too often, our perspectives on the past have been clouded by Western ethnocentrism, with models that deny the capacity of non‐European states to develop collective institutions, and by contemporary ethnocentrism, which views both landscape and culture divorced from each other, static and unchanging (Butzer, ; Cronon, ; Ghosal, Athreya, & Linnell, ; Morehart, ).…”

“…The possible function of the Street of the Dead as a monumental water feature attests to water's fundamental role in the Teotihuacano cosmology. The two most prominent deities in Teotihuacan's iconography were both related to water: a storm god and a goddess of flowing water (Evans & Nichols, ). If the Ciudadela was intentionally flooded to evoke the watery underworld of the Central Mexican creation myth, the performance was likely linked to rituals legitimizing the authority of Teotihuacan's enigmatic leaders.…”