Teotihuacan was not a City

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In one of her final SAA presentations, Professor Nichols and colleagues described demographic and chronological issues in current models of the Teotihuacan-period Basin of Mexico. They note that Teotihuacan’s population trajectory implies it was a major resource and demographic sink in the Basin, questioning the hinterland’s capacity to sustain the city’s growth and mere existence. While they suggested inter-generational mobility into Teotihuacan as a possible solution to the demographic sink, it would only serve to exacerbate the resource sink reducing cultivated suitable lands around the Basin. Given the myriad of ‘pulsating ceremonial centers’ documented around the Ancient Americas, I argue that seasonal migrations to and from Teotihuacan by most of its alleged full-time residents were the norm until its collapse. I evaluate the agronomic, architectural, political, linguistic-epigraphic, and isotopic evidence for permanent settlement at the ancient city, finding that seasonal mobility better-explains Teotihuacan’s peculiarities versus a status as a ‘capital’. I close with a comparison to Ibiza and Palma de Mallorca—two party towns in the Balearic Islands, Spain, with a significant pulsating population, monumental architecture, numerous high-class immigrants, high-quality durable housing & infrastructure, and significant political & ritual importance, yet behaving fundamentally unlike what archaeologists expect cities to be.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50900