CHAPTER 1 ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF MESOAMERICAN CIVILIZATION 57Figure 1.9 Locations of major Classic period, Terminal Classic/Epiclassic period, and Early
Postclassic sites.
The names of structures, streets, and the city itself are words from Nahuatl, the
language of the Aztecs; curiously, we do not know for certain who the people were
who lived at Teotihuacan or what language they spoke. Almost a millennia after its
demise, Teotihuacan, “city of the gods” in Nahuatl, was viewed as a sacred place by
the Aztecs; and according to Aztec myths, this was the place where the sun was born.
Portions of Teotihuacan lie above a network of tunnels. The entrance to the largest
of these is near the base of the central staircase of the Pyramid of the Sun, and it leads
to a chamber directly under the top of the pyramid. Whereas it was once believed that
this was a natural, if modified, cave, recent research suggests that these underground
cavities were actually quarry sites created by early Teotihuacanos to provide construc-
tion material for the city’s massive construction projects. Subsequently, the cavity under
the Pyramid of the Sun was used for rituals. For Mesoamericans, caves had sacred
qualtites; they were viewed as entrances to the underworld, and the sun, moon, and
even humans were believed to have emerged from caves in the mythological past.
Settlement at Teotihuacan was laid out in a roughly concentric pattern. Major
temples, elite residences, and civic buildings including a market were located along
the Street of the Dead. These were surrounded by a zone of densely packed apart-
ment compounds that housed the bulk of the city’s populace, and this area was in turn
surrounded by a zone of scattered huts that housed farmers (Figure 1.10).NChich'en Itza
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