MEXICO: How animals, people, and rituals created Teotihuacán

(Press-News.org) The remains of nearly 200 animals found in Mexico’s Teotihuacán are helping reconstruct history.

The unearthing and significance of these remains, found in four chambers within the Moon Pyramid — dating back nearly 2,000 years — are central in Nawa Sugiyama’s new book, “Animal Matter: Ritual, Place, and Sovereignty at the Moon Pyramid of Teotihuacan,” published by Oxford University Press. 

Teotihuacán, one of the first megacities of the Western Hemisphere and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is situated about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. It is home to one of the most important ceremonial landscapes in Mesoamerica and was once the most influential metropolis in the region. Nearly 2,000 years later, Sugiyama, an assistant professor of anthropology at UC Riverside, joined the team that uncovered four dedicatory chambers with nearly 200 animal remains. 

In the largest chamber, measuring approximately 16-feet by 14-feet and known as burial 6, the team found 12 human remains along with over 100 animals, including 33 complete animal remains. This is believed to be one of the most abundant cases of mass animal sacrifice ever found in Teotihuacán and comparable only to those conducted by the Aztec empire over 1000 years later. 

Animals were major protagonists in Teotihuacán since they were gifted, sacrificed, or venerated, Sugiyama said. Most were apex predators, meaning top predators within the food chain.

“That’s really interesting from the zooarchaeology standpoint because there’s a fundamental shift in the ways we know Indigenous communities understood these potent apex predators as active agents and mediators of the sky realm, the earth, and the underworld,” Sugiyama said. “They were also in conversation with and interacting, sometimes in very dangerous ways, with the human communities that were trying to make connections to — and have power over —these natural sources of power themselves.”

Studying the bones using multi-archaeometric methodologies, including zooarchaeology and isotopes (bone chemistry), Sugiyama uncovered many details of these animal’s lives, including sex, diet, age, and whether they were sacrificed dead or alive. One common denominator she found in their diet was maize, or corn; in addition to maize serving as the primary staple food in Mesoamerica, many civilizations believed humans were created from maize and the crop served an important process in cultural and religious practices.   

“I don’t think it’s a mere coincidence, they were part of that process of creating a new politics, a new landscape, in which animals and humans coordinated one of the most ambitious ceremonial landscape constructions in ancient Mesoamerica,” Sugiyama said. 

Analyzing animal matter has allowed Sugiyama to recreate parts of the lives of animals such as golden eagles, Mexican gray wolves, hawks, owls, and falcons. The team also found evidence of jaguars, pumas, wolves, and rattlesnakes. 

Burial 6, the largest dedicatory chamber found, must have once been a “State spectacle,” witnessed by thousands of people, Sugiyama said. Sacrifices were government-sanctioned ritual performances staged at the heart of the Moon Pyramid. Teotihuacán thrived between 100 B.C. and 650 A.D., more than 1,000 years before the eminent Aztec civilization settled in. At its height, 100,000 people inhabited the metropolis.    

One of the stories lifted from the soils of ancient Teotihuacán is the importance of the golden eagle, an animal still held in high regard today. 

Sugiyama’s unearthing of 18 golden eagles in burial 6, representing one for each of the 18 months in Teotihuacán’s 365-day calendar, allows her to reimagine what the dedicatory ceremony would have looked like nearly 2,000 years ago. Sugiyama suggests the birds were carried by State officials on their forearm or shoulder (or some in captivity) through Teotihuacán’s main corridor leading to the endpoint, the Moon Pyramid, known as the Calzada de los Muertos or Avenue of the Dead. 

Today, golden eagles are still incorporated in national customs, such as the annual Mexican Independence Parade when a Mexican cadet parades to the city’s federal building, known as Zócalo, with a golden eagle standing on his forearm. 

“We are able to see the matter in which ancient Teotihuacanos materialized, felt, heard, created space, and understood their cosmos directly through the messages that are provided to us archeologists through the material remains of the bones that are speaking to us 2,000 years later,” Sugiyama said.

More on Nawa Sugiyama’s summer excavation work in Teotihuacán (story, photos, and video). 

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