The burning of Teotihuacan’s ceremonial centre

For centuries Teotihuacan had been the largest city in the Americas and the most influential power in Mesoamerica. At the end of its classic age the major ritual and administrative buildings along the Avenue of the Dead were set on fire, and the sculptures in palatial compounds such as Xalla were deliberately shattered. Early excavators, who dug mainly in temples and palaces, concluded that invaders had burned the whole city; later work showed that the destruction was concentrated on the civic and religious core and on dwellings of the ruling class, and no traces of a foreign invasion have been found.

The date is debated. Linda Manzanilla, citing radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic dating from the Teopancazco neighbourhood centre, places the fire around 550, at the end of the Xolalpan phase, and the English Wikipedia follows this date; older reconstructions put the destruction in the 7th or even the 8th century, and the Russian article dates the sack and burning of the centre to the mid-7th century and the abandonment to the mid-8th, although another section places the start of the decline in the mid-6th. Manzanilla interprets the burning as a revolt against the ruling elite, perhaps provoked by the state’s attempt to control the enterprising intermediate elites who headed the city’s multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Others point to an ecological crisis: skeletons of the 6th century show a higher share of young people with signs of malnutrition, and the English article links the decline with droughts after the climatic crisis of 535–536.

After the fire Teotihuacan remained inhabited, but in the Metepec phase (about 550–650) it no longer dominated Mesoamerica, and other centres of the Central Highlands, such as Cholula, Xochicalco and Cacaxtla, competed to fill the void. In the same decades the Maya lowlands were reshaped too: in 562 Tikal, long Teotihuacan’s ally, was defeated by its rivals. Centuries later the Aztecs revered the ruins as the place where the gods were born.