Reading Power from Above: Subsistence, Monumentality, and Water Ritual in Ancient Teotihuacan

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.

Proponents of collective and autocratic models of Teotihuacan’s sociopolitical organization relate the control and ritual of water to the development of complex society, but how such institutions materialize on the landscape remains poorly understood. We present evidence from six years of archaeological survey, excavation, remote sensing, and a reinterpretation of mural art, suggesting that large amounts of energy and social capital were invested in the construction and maintenance of systems to capture broadly distributed rainwaters. Wide, shallow canals—dammed at semi-regular intervals—served to retain highly erosive runoff while making waters available for diversion irrigation and other purposes. Evidence of such systems exists in the contemporary archaeological record among the barrancas of the Southern Teotihuacan Valley. These tiered reservoir systems were of sufficient importance to the builders of the ancient city that they were monumentalized and memorialized in the construction of the Street of the Dead, which served as the destination of a significant portion of the valley’s rerouted floodwater networks. This spatial and hydraulic axis mundi was incorporated into the ideology and state ritual of Teotihuacan in radically different ways by different rulers, suggesting dramatic constrictions in political accessibility as the city expanded, despite political origins rooted in broad-based public legitimacy.

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): 32982