Teotihuacan and the Valley of Mexico

During the Classic period of Pre-Columbian Mexican culture (ca 200 BO--1000 ce), a vast planned urban develop­ment was created at Teotihuacán, meaning "place of the gods," in the Valley of Mexico, by a people whose name we do not know. It arose northwest of the Olmec sites subsequent to the Olmec decline, covers some thirteen square miles, and once served a population as large as 200,000 people. In the city's ritual center, design­ers laid out a great north-south causeway, terminated on the north by the stepped Pyramid of the Moon. Alongside the causeway, they placed a series of earthen terraces with battered walls faced with stone veneer; a great stepped pyramid—the Pyramid ₀f the Sun and walled enclosures, some sunken and some defined by tra-beated construction covered with low-relief sculpture.

The horizontal plane dominates here, perhaps inspired by the sprawl of the valley floor. This horizontally is cele­brated by means of two distinctive ordering devices. The battered walls of the terraces and pyramids display the talud and tablero motifs that would be repeated with many variations throughout Mesoamerica. The talud is a sloping plane and the tablero a frieze of random stones framed by plain moldings.

Exquisitely carved columns in the so-called Palace of the Quetzalbutterfly located on the west side of the plaza and in front of the Temple of the Moon, document the appreciation among Teotihuacan's inhabitants of the hard-edged quality of stone. The plan of the Palace of Atel-telco , located west of the causeway and between the Temple of the Sun and the so-called Citadel, demonstrate—in its complex geometry of interlocking squares, its many level changes, its proportioning systems, and its layering of columns, piers, and walls—a sophisti­cated understanding of geometric ordering and spatial sequence.

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