Foreign Influence on Teotihuacan’s Religion through an Iconographic Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Foreign influence was a major component at Teotihuacan from very early on and throughout Teotihuacan’s history. Extensive archaeological research notes Teotihuacan as a religious center and the largest Classic Mesoamerican city with multiethnic apartment compounds and neighborhoods. However, the impact of foreign influence on Teotihuacan’s religion has not been studied. In this paper I present new perspectives of multicultural influence on Teotihuacan’s religion through the study of iconography. Here, I analyze foreign impact on the Teotihuacan state deity strongly associated with cosmology, the Teotihuacan Tlaloc from the iconographic and the archaeological record. In addition, I analyze heart and blood offerings depicted in Teotihuacan’s iconography to note the presence of foreign influence. My interpretations are derived from cross cultural comparisons of iconographic representations of offerings associated with blood, hearts, maize, and rain deities represented in other Mesoamerican cultures such as with the Maya and Zapotec. Finally, I suggest that Teotihuacan integrated multiethnic religious ideology through iconographic representations at Teotihuacan, which may have contributed to Teotihuacan’s continued presence in other areas of Mesoamerica even after the fall of Teotihuacan and into the Late Classic period (AD 600–900).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32139