ASU Research E-Magazine: Pyramid of Mystery

It is told that when (all) was in darkness, when yet no sun had shone and no dawn had broken ... the gods gathered together and took counsel among themselves at Teotihuacan.

—Aztec myth translated in the 16th century A.D. by Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún

In the 16th century, Spanish officials made reports to King Philip II about a curious village nestled amongst ancient pyramids in the Basin of Mexico. Here, the Aztec natives lived in dwellings that looked more like palaces than homes. Many spoke of ancient times when their small town was a thickly populated metropolis. They called it Teotihuacan—the “City of the Gods.” Legends told of how the gods had built the monuments in the older part of the city.

Despite their mythical ties to the area, however, many of the natives were almost as new to the region as the Spanish. The Aztecs had come into the Basin of Mexico only a few centuries before and adopted the ancient city as a religious center to legitimize their young empire—to root their power in a place where they so recently had become masters.

The original inhabitants had abandoned the city about 700 years before. Their customs, why they built such impressive structures, and even the name they gave their great city has remained a mystery ever since.

Much of this, no doubt, was churning through the minds of Mexico’s scientists, politicians, and reporters who rushed to the city in October 1998 when they heard the news: Deep inside Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon, Arizona State University archaeologist Saburo Sugiyama had found something incredible. Sugiyama is now a professor at Japan’s Nagano University.

While tunneling toward the pyramid’s center, Sugiyama’s team uncovered the skeleton of a man who died about 1,800 years ago. He was buried with hundreds of rich offerings such as greenstone figurines, obsidian knives, eagles, and jaguars.

According to legend, the leaders of Teotihuacan were buried underneath the pyramids. Since this burial was the richest ever discovered in Teotihuacan, experts were betting that the skeleton was that of a ruler—the first ever found.

But was he? The man beneath the pyramid is proving to be as elusive as the city itself, defying labels the public is so anxious to give him, and leaving scientists with more questions than answers.

Mesoamerican Superpower
Saburo Sugiyama pulled a greenstone figurine from the earthy grave and held it in his arms like a newborn. Although it had been buried for 1,800 years, its little teeth still sparkled. Its chalky eyes still stared out from a protective scowl.

Sugiyama’s team of archaeologists had been tunneling since June 1998 under a joint project between ASU and INAH, Mexico’s national anthropology and historical institution. The digging went slower than expected, despite 12- to 16-hour workdays. Funding to support the dig was almost exhausted.

Sugiyama, 46, first came to Mexico from his home country of Japan in 1979. He didn’t speak Spanish, and his only knowledge of the country came from books he had read. But from those books, Sugiyama became fascinated with Mexican history and culture—especially the ancient civilization of Teotihuacan.

Teotihuacan (pronounced tay-oh-TEE-wa-kahn) grew into a major population center 30 miles northeast of what is now Mexico City around the first century A.D. The massive, stepped pyramids of the sun and the moon were built sometime during the next few hundred years. At its peak in the sixth century, the city was larger than Imperial Rome, covering eight square miles. And its 150,000 people made the city more populous than Washington, D.C. during Lincoln’s presidency, more than 1,300 years later.

In its day, Teotihuacan was a Mesoamerican superpower. Its dominance over the region was so complete that its cultural influence can still be found in prehistoric sites as far as 1,100 miles away in Guatemala.

This is where the action was. Crowded markets were scattered across the city where people would haggle over squash and rabbit meat, ceramic pots and knives made from chipped obsidian. Teotihuacano artists combined images of humans, animals, and architecture in complex murals colored red, blue, and green. Architects expanded the city according to one of the world’s first organized plans, aligning the grid-like streets just east of true north.

And in the middle of it all, the Street of the Dead cut through the city, forming its major artery. This wasn’t any ordinary boulevard. The Street of the Dead is about 160 feet wide and more than 2 1/2 miles long. It probably was used for public gatherings or religious ceremonies.

Everyone seemed to have lived within the city at this time. Farmers walked in from the fields as many as 20 miles to their homes built next to those of potters and textile workers.

Why farmers would want to do this is one of the many mysteries of Teotihuacan, says George Cowgill, an ASU anthropology professor. Cowgill is an expert on Teotihuacano archaeology. He helped map the ancient city during the 1960s.

“It’s just loony if you think about it from a utilitarian point of view,” he explains. About two-thirds of Teotihuacan’s population was farmers, implying that there must have been huge migrations back and forth from the fields everyday.

Cowgill thinks there must have been some political or religious reason to keep everyone in the city. They could have been forced to stay.

The city thrived for almost 700 years. But during its last 100 years, things began to change. Scientists aren’t exactly sure, but the government could have become more repressive. Its citizens could have gotten tired of living in such a rigid society.

Whatever tensions existed, they reached a breaking point in the eighth century A.D. In an explosion of activity, people attacked government buildings. They burned palaces and slaughtered the people inside. This was no ordinary war. People moved across the Street of the Dead, systematically dismantling and burning monument after monument. The fury of the destruction culminated in a holocaust so fierce, it melted stone.

Was this a civil war? Or did some rival group attack the city?

Why Teotihuacan tumbled may never be known. Little more than black chunks of charcoal are left to describe what happened. Although its dominance of the region lasted several centuries, nothing was ever written to document the history of the great city. Little has been found to describe the feats of Teotihuacan’s military or the courage of its leaders.

There is so little evidence of a king that some believe Teotihuacan never had a single ruler. It may have been one of the world’s first republics.

“There are so many questions about this place that haven’t been answered, so many things we still don’t know,” Sugiyama says.

A few years after arriving, Sugiyama had learned enough Spanish to get a job as an archaeological field assistant with INAH. And during a 1983 excavation at Teotihuacan, he made a discovery that would not only spark his professional career as an archaeologist, but also lead to some of the biggest finds in Mesoamerican archaeology.

While digging around the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, a smaller structure two kilometers south of the Pyramid of the Moon, Sugiyama uncovered a massive burial containing 18 sacrificed men.

Why were they killed? As an offering to the gods? To commemorate the death of a ruler? Sugiyama persuaded Cowgill and INAH archaeologist RubŽn Cabrera to dig inside the structure and find out.

Temple of the Feathered Serpent
Statues of serpents wrap around the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and poke their heads out from the west wall. The temple is located within a larger structure archaeologists have named the “Citadel,” which can fit as many as 100,000 people inside its high walls.

“This was the downtown, high-rent part of the city,” Cowgill says.

Archaeologists believe that this was Teotihuacan’s cultural and political center. And whoever the rulers were, they were most likely buried here.

In the summer of 1988, Cowgill, Cabrera, and Sugiyama started tunneling inside the temple. Behind its carved walls, they found the sacrificed remains of an estimated 200 people. Most were buried with their hands behind their backs, as if they were bound. They could have been killed with poison or by having their hearts torn out. They could have been buried alive.

But it was while tunneling toward the center of the temple that the team came across the biggest surprise of all: Somebody, possibly the Teotihuacanos themselves, had cut their own jagged tunnel through the structure in search of valuables buried with the dead.

The team followed the looter’s tunnel as it neared the center. There, they found about 20 more sacrificed warriors. And disappointingly, next to them sat three large pits, which were almost completely dug out.

“It was sort of like, where’s the body?” Cowgill says. “There might have been one or two tombs of rulers (inside). We don’t know. I suspect that’s what it was, but we don’t have the hard evidence.”

Inside the Moon
Ten years later, Sugiyama was again looking inside Teotihuacan’s ancient monuments for keys to its past. This time, he tunneled into the 151-foot-tall Pyramid of the Moon, one of the largest structures in the city, second only to the Pyramid of the Sun.

computer generated drawing of the Pyramid of the Moon

In a trailer outside the pyramid, Sugiyama showed off a new tool he’d been using for this excavation, a laptop computer. The click of an icon opens a three dimensional image of the pyramid. Straight blue lines indicate the pyramid’s boundaries. Yellow lines clearly mark the path meticulously carved through the tunnel and mapped using a laser-guided surveying device.

Using the program, Sugiyama can swivel the entire pyramid left and right. The viewer can look down on the pyramid from above or move through the tunnel meter by meter.

A two-foot-thick concrete archway supports the entrance into the tunnel built by Sugiyama’s team. The air inside the dark corridor is heavy with the scent of a million tons of moist, volcanic earth supported above.

This was the logical place for Sugiyama to continue the search for a Teotihuacano ruler. Unlike the pyramids of the Sun and Feathered Serpent, the Pyramid of the Moon had never been formally excavated. The loose interior soil kept other researchers away, fearing cave-ins.

Sugiyama hopes it has kept grave robbers away as well.

Loose dirt crumbles off the walls a few inches from the elbows of a Mexican worker as he pushes a wheelbarrow through a corridor dimly lit by light bulbs wrapped in aluminum foil. At the end of the tunnel, a few men crowd behind another, who pounds a two-meter steel rod into the opposing wall, loosening large chunks of dirt with every blow.

When Sugiyama decided to punch a hole inside the pyramid, he could only guess how long it would take to burrow to the center. Although the outside is faced with coarse, volcanic stones, the inside is filled with a mixture of boulders, rocks and soil.

Some days the diggers came across large sections of packed dirt and were able to push the tunnel forward an entire meter. But other days they encountered a wall of basketball-sized boulders and had to move slowly, prying each out one by one.

Sugiyama’s team started digging the entrance of the tunnel in June 1998. After only a few meters, they uncovered what appeared to be an earlier wall that once formed the outer portion of the pyramid.

Like an onion, the Pyramid of the Moon is layered with previous structures that at one time formed the outer face of the pyramid. If Teotihuacan had individual rulers, each of these layers could have been built as a monument to a different one, Cowgill says.

In August 1998, the team broke through two more walls, believed to be part of yet another substructure. And at the end of August, Sugiyama’s team came across the corner of a final substructure, which could date before the first century A.D.

By October, the team had reached 27 meters inside of the pyramid and was ready to push north towards the center. But they didn’t get far before they came across what appeared to be the skeleton of an animal.

Denise To, an ASU graduate student specializing in osteology, was called in to identify the bones. Brushing around the skeleton, To uncovered the pointed orange beak of a large bird, possibly an eagle.

Birds just don’t get buried naturally underneath pyramids—people had to have put it there, and this meant the team had gotten close to something important.

At this point, they stopped digging with large tools. The team crouched together, squinting in the dim light as they poked around with dental picks in search of artifacts. They pulled out jewelry made from shells, ceramic pots, obsidian figurines, and more bird skeletons.

figurine of a standing person with arms at sides
This small jade figure was recovered from the burial site inside the Pyramid of the Moon.

On Oct. 15, 1998, To entered the tunnel at sunrise and saw a bright patch of white through the surface of the soil. They were bones. These belonged to a man. The lower legs poked out of the eastern tunnel wall from the knees down. The rest of the body was crouched in a sitting position, head between the knees.

Before him were 15 knives made from flaked obsidian. They were placed in two star-like shapes, each with three knives pointing north, three to the south, and three east-to-west. In the center of one star was an elongated statue carved in the form of a feathered serpent.

In the corner of the tunnel, a wooden cage was uncovered that contained the skeletons of two large cats—probably jaguars. Because droppings were found in the cage, they were probably buried alive.

In late October 1998, INAH officials called a press conference to announce the discovery. Sugiyama’s team escorted hundreds of politicians, scientists, and reporters in groups of four through the tunnel to see the body. Everyone wanted to know if this person was once a ruler. Sugiyama was not yet ready to call him one. He could only see part of the skeleton—most of it was still entombed inside the tunnel wall.

His caution proved prophetic. As the team pulled the rest of the skeleton out of the wall, the man’s hands were found behind his back, as if they were bound.

“We now think that the burial was not a ruler but a sacrificed person,” Sugiyama says. The question now is why this person was sacrificed. Was it a dedication to the pyramid? To one of Teotihuacan’s earliest kings? Or was he a captured enemy of the state?

The Final Push
Sugiyama delicately wrapped the greenstone figurine in tinfoil and placed it in a paper box with dozens of other artifacts. They will be taken back to the laboratory, examined, and then stacked on a shelf next to thousands of other boxes full of artifacts retrieved over the years.

Information about Teotihuacan’s prehistoric past is growing. And, ruler or not, Sugiyama’s find will provide scientists with years of material for study.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter whether they find a ruler,” Cowgill says. “We’re really just looking for answers to questions, and this burial could provide those answers.”

But Sugiyama hasn’t given up the search yet. His team is still about 60 meters from the center and somewhere along their path Sugiyama said he expects to find a ruler. His team has continued digging through the pyramid in 1999. Perhaps in the months ahead, just maybe, they will find another person buried underneath the moon.

And perhaps this one will be a king.—Chris Kahn