Access supplemental materials and multimedia. The Pyramid of the Sun, which looms over the city, was built in stages over a period of time in the second century of the common era. In 1962, Smith (1987:5) tunneled from the east to the approximate center of the Pyramid at the base of the fifth cuerpo (Figure 1). And its origins are a mystery. Cowgill says the site's visible surface remains have all been mapped in detail. "What were the social, political, and religious practices that provided such stability? The Teotihuacan people predated the Maya by over five hundred years, and the Aztec by more than a thousand years. Some archaeologists hypothesize that climate change and severe droughts led to internal unrest that may have caused the destruction of the city. ", https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/archaeology/teotihuacan.html, George Cowgill, an archaeologist at Arizona State University. The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest structure in Teotihuacan, and the second largest in Mesoamerica. PLEASE NOTE: NCpedia provides the comments feature as a way for viewers to engage with the resources. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. To access this article, please, Access everything in the JPASS collection, Download up to 10 article PDFs to save and keep, Download up to 120 article PDFs to save and keep. Pyramid and cave dates are reconciled with each other, with ceramics, and with the ceramic chronology. The Pyramid of the Sun was built in 2 A.D. along with the surrounding city of Teotihuacan and the Pyramid of the Moon. © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, © 2015- Many of these journals are the leading academic publications in their fields and together they form one of the most valuable and comprehensive bodies of research available today. El Proyecto Pirámide también reinterpretó los fechados obtenidos en la cueva y concluyó que estos son del mismo periodo que los nuevos resultados previamente mencionados. The Pyramids of Sun and Moon were also religious temples which were dedicated to the gods of sun and moon, Tlaloc and Chalchihuitlicue. Others note that the Toltec peaked far later than Teotihuacan's zenith, undermining that theory. But it was the Aztec, descending on the abandoned site, no doubt falling awestruck by what they saw, who gave its current name: Teotihuacan. Artisans of the city are known for the sweeping grandeur of the buildings they left behind, and numerous artifacts made from obsidian, a black volcanic rock indigenous to the region. No matter its principal builders, evidence shows that Teotihuacan hosted a patchwork of cultures including the Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec. It was built by hand more than a thousand years before the swooping arrival of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztec in central Mexico. "It had thousands of residential compounds and scores of pyramid-temples ... comparable to the largest pyramids of Egypt.". Los fechados obtenidos en la pirámide se interpretan como momentos que representan los rituales de terminación de la cueva y la contemporánea redefinición de la pirámide, la cual incluyó modificaciones arquitectónicas, así como la excavación de túneles. This item has a Creative Commons license for re-use. 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. The Pyramid of the Sun (top) is the largest structure in the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Mexico, and one of the largest buildings of its kind on the Western Hemisphere. For Cowgill, who says more studies are needed to understand the lives of the poorer classes that inhabited Teotihuacan, the mystery lies not as much in who built the city or in why it fell. Se considera que ambas jugaron un rol importante en la formación de la ciudad. ANCHOR will be down for maintenance on Nov. 23rd from 3:00 pm until approximately 5:00 pm. Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org) is the publishing division of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s leading research institutions and winner of 81 Nobel Prizes. It covered 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) and supported a population of a hundred thousand, according to George Cowgill, an archaeologist at Arizona State University and a National Geographic Society grantee. I interpret the dates from the Pyramid as reflecting ritual associated with cave termination and a concomitant redefinition of the Pyramid that involved architectural modifications and tunneling. This Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license means that you may use, remix, tweak, and build upon the work for non-commerical purposes as long as you credit the original creator and as long as you license your new creation using the same license. The traditional view based on ceramics is that construction of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan commenced in the first century A.D. A famed archaeological site located fewer than 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Mexico City, Teotihuacan reached its zenith between 100 B.C. Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. The main excavations, performed by Professors Saburo Sugiyama of Aichi Prefectural University in Japan and Rubén Cabrera, a Mexican archaeologist, have been at the Pyramid of the Moon. Oddly, Teotihuacan, which contains a massive central road (the Street of the Dead) and buildings including the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, has no military structuresâthough experts say the military and cultural wake of Teotihuacan was heavily felt throughout the region. For more information about Creative Commons licensing and a link to the license, see full details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. "Rather than asking why Teotihuacan collapsed, it is more interesting to ask why it lasted so long," he says. Please allow one business day for replies from NCpedia. With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free. Latin American Antiquity is a quarterly journal devoted to special reports on archaeology, prehistory, and ethnohistory in Mesoamerica, Central America, South America, and culturally related areas. It's unclear why Teotihuacan collapsed; one theory is that poorer classes carried out an internal uprising against the elite. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, JPASS®, Artstor®, Reveal Digital™ and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. Two projects investigated the east-west cen-terline at higher elevations. A very large stone pyramid rises from a grass field. © 2015 Cambridge University Press Request Permissions. Likewise, radiocarbon dates from the artificial cave beneath the Pyramid indicate that it was created at about the same time. Check out using a credit card or bank account with. Some scholars say the Totonac culture was responsible. It is also the third largest pyramid in the world. Like many Mesoamerican pyramids, each was constructed around a core of … It was massive, one of the first great cities of the Western Hemisphere. It was there, beneath layers of dirt and stone, that researchers realized the awe-inspiring craftsmanship of Teotihuacan's architects was matched by a cultural penchant for brutality and human and animal sacrifice. Sload] WHEN WAS THE SUN PYRAMID BUILT? 223 Figure 1. The Teotihuacán built the Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon between A.D. 1 and 250. Since 2003, archaeologist Sergio Gomez has been working to access new parts of the complex, and has only recently reached the end of a tunnel that could hold a king's tomb. The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest structure in Teotihuacan, and the second largest in Mesoamerica. Los estudios tradicionales basados en la cerámica han determinado que la construcción de la Pirámide del Sol de Teotihuacán comenzó alrededor del siglo uno d.C. De la misma manera, los fechados radiocarbónicos de la cueva artificial ubicada debajo de la pirámide indican que dicha cueva fue construida contemporáneamente a la pirámide. En este artículo se presenta un conjunto más completo de fechados radiocarbónicos obtenidos a partir de muestras adquiridas de la cueva y se analizan los datos utilizando una inferencia bayesiana.