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Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in Central Mexico (Case Studies in Early Societies)

by George L. Cowgill (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 43 ratings
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This is the first comprehensive English-language book on the largest city in the Americas before the 1400s. Teotihuacan is a UNESCO world heritage site, located in highland central Mexico, about twenty-five miles from Mexico City, visited by millions of tourists every year. The book begins with Cuicuilco, a predecessor that arose around 400 BCE, then traces Teotihuacan from its founding in approximately 150 BCE to its collapse around 600 CE. It describes the city's immense pyramids and other elite structures. It also discusses the dwellings and daily lives of commoners, including men, women, and children, and the craft activities of artisans. George L. Cowgill discusses politics, economics, technology, art, religion, and possible reasons for Teotihuacan's rise and fall. Long before the Aztecs and 800 miles from Classic Maya centers, Teotihuacan was part of a broad Mesoamerican tradition but had a distinctive personality that invites comparison with other states and empires of the ancient world.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0521690447
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0521690447
  3. Publisher
    Cambridge University Press
  4. Publication date
    April 6, 2015
  5. Part of series
    Case Studies in Early Societies
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 0.71 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    312 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Drawing on half a century of intimate involvement with the archaeology of Teotihuacan, George L. Cowgill provides a lucid and synthetic account of this iconic early city and civilization. It will appeal to anyone interested in the deep roots of urbanism and human creation of cities."
David M. Carballo, Boston University

"In the authoritative words of archaeologist George L. Cowgill, Ancient Teotihuacan presents the great pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan and its people. He offers a fresh synthesis of decades of research about this unusually large and influential multiethnic city whose legacy has made it a UNESCO World Heritage site."
Deborah L. Nichols, Dartmouth College

"Ancient Teotihuacan details eight centuries of history of the first city in the Americas. A lucid combination of solid data and sophisticated theory reveals why this civilization flourished, how its sociopolitical system changed over time, and what factors brought about its decline. Fifty years of archaeological research make George L. Cowgill the world’s authority on the subject, and his book the most ambitious ever written."
Leonardo López Luján, Director of the Templo Mayor Project

"George Cowgill has given us a worthy summary of one of the most fascinating cultures in the prehispanic New World."
Norman Hammond, Antiquity

Book Description

This is the first comprehensive English-language book on Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Americas before the 1400s.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press (April 6, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0521690447
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0521690447
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.71 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 43 ratings

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
43 global ratings
Full of facts but hard to read.
3 Stars
Full of facts but hard to read.
With an upcoming archeological tour to Teotihuacan, I got this book for background. It is densely packed with facts and details of the excavation history of this very famous ruin near Mexico City, visited by more tourists annually than any other ancient Mexican site. Most of what archeologists know about Teotihuacan comes from ceramics studies, since the ancient culture left no writing. Excavations of buildings along with ceramic dating gives a historic time line that spans 100 BC to 650 AD. From analyzing buildings, archeologists learned this was a multi-ethnic culture with distinct residential complexes, early collective governance that evolved into sets of dominant individuals who created immense pyramids and avenues lined with palaces. Teotihuacan earned the title "empire" and spread influence to the west and south as far as Guatemala and Honduras, where they overthrew local Maya rulers and set up new dynasties.Eventually this great civilization declined, probably due to expanding elites culling off flows of wealth and labor and reducing central authority. Climate changes, volcanic eruptions, drought, and diminishing food resources added stresses and the city was mostly abandoned after 700 AD. Its elites moved elsewhere and influences subsequent cultures including Totonac, Toltec, and Aztec.Only a determined reader who really wants to learn about this ancient culture will plow through the dense prose and unending stream of facts. Organizing the material in a more reader-friendly way would help. Plowing through pages of ceramic sequences often put me to sleep. But if you're a Mesoamerica archeological buff, you will learn a great deal from this well-researched and thorough book.
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Top reviews from the United States

E. N. Anderson
5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough account of a great city
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2015
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This is a wonderful in-depth guide to what was America's biggest city for many centuries. George Cowgill has devoted a very long professional life to it, and now summarizes it in this convenient and readable introduction. The book has enough comments on theory and method to be valuable to the specialist too. Cowgill refers to many scholarly controversies and gives his conclusions, informed by his unmatched familiarity with the site. One thing worth noting is his citation of students and their research--a very commendable thing to do. All in all a great basic work.
7 people found this helpful
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Dewdrop
5.0 out of 5 stars clear and comprehensive overview
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2019
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This book pulls together what is known about Teotihuacan - the archaeological site and also the society that produced it. Very clear.
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S. Hancock
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2018
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I visited Teotihuacan in 1969 and did not much about it then. I have read more about it since then, and was hoping to learn more about what has been discovered since 1969. This book was interesting, but still a lot of conjecture about life there and not much about actual finds.
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Nicole
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Buy
Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2019
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Book is good condition , no missing pages and a lot cheaper than buying then at your college bookstore
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"pen name 34"
3.0 out of 5 stars This Is A Book About Potsherds And Monumental Architecture, Not A Book About A City
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2016
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Reading this book was a rather frustrating experience, much like a recent book on Mayan waterborne traders that I could mention if I could bother to remember the title. It's a wonderful rehearsal of all the physical evidence anthropologists have found at the site, but it says pretty much nothing about Teotihuacan as a city.

The author clearly has access to a great deal of data about street layouts. However, he has absolutely nothing to say about street uses, development along existing streets, or what the streets can tell us about different land uses. Even in the well-defined ceremonial precinct, the author makes absolutely no effort to discuss traffic patters, evolving uses, spatial distribution or the interrelationship between urban layout and architecture on one hand and seasonal weather patterns on the other. One might almost be willing to bet that no one has bothered to try to identify key intersections, dig there, and then attempt to say something reasoned about not only static items but movement within the city. The result is an attempt to define life within the city according to architecture rather than explore the pivots, movements, centers for street life (not to mention buisness, politics and the odd game of Teotihuacano Three-Card Monte) and everyday non-ritual activities that make up the way people actually lived rather than the environment they sometimes lived in.

The city is built on the far side of two hills from a local volcano. Is there any reason to believe they hoped to redirect pyroclastic flows that headed their way? Did the city's walls, large structures and position relative to the volcanoes serve to mitigate ash, soot and fumes periodically issuing from the volcano? We have no idea. The author mentions some speculation that these spaces may also have been used for water management, but doesn't really take the time to explore how functional they would be for that purpose.

Which raises another point: what in the hell did they do for water management? There's consistently been some settlement nestled into the hills just to the northwest of the ceremonial precinct in an area relatively far from densely urbanized sections of the city and from the two local waterways. What did they do for water? Did they gather it from the hillside behind them, or keep an army of servants constantly busy carrying pots of water up the hill.? Come to think of it, were there any reservoirs for the city as a whole, or local natural features that would serve the same function? There's real mention of water infrastructure at all except for a dismissive treatment of the canalized sections of the San Juan and the San Lorenzo.

Even there, the author bypasses an excellent opportunity to develop a better sense of how Teotihuacan worked as a city. Were the canalized sections gathering places in the city, a favor done at public expense for elites, or perhaps the preserve of industries that were particularly dependent on water for materials, processing or transportation? The author informs us that certain populations within the city were concentrated around the eastern (terminal) end of the San Juan canal which is probably about were the uncanalized San Juan could be expected to run out or go underground. Were those populations deliberately sited there, or were they latecomers who got lucky when the San Juan was canalized? Who, if anyone, would have been responsible for allocating the water there? Given the tremendously elaborate water management regimes we've seen in northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States, who was in charge of keeping the canals cleared and in good repair?

Although the author does at least begin a discussion about the urban transition zone around the San Juan, he only describes some of the different physical features and speculates on how they may have been used. The area around the Sun and Moon temples is clearly designed in a very different way from the area just south of the San Juan. The author does mention that Teotihuacan's early history may have seen the joining of smaller settlements into what became the urban whole. The author also mentions that different kinds of sherds indicate the presence of culturally distinct groups in the Teotihuacan area. So why in the world would he not take the next logical step and ask whether the San Juan eventually served as a fossil demarcation between two distinct groups that eventually melded into Teotihucanos? It's not as if he didn't take some time to explore the difference between those who lived along the San Lorenzo and those who lived closer to the apparent urban core. Instead the best he can offer is some mild speculation that it may reflect class or economic differences without asking whether there was an ethnic or cultural background to those class and economic differences. It ain't the 1970s anymore, dangit!

I had thought that archaeologists spend half of their professional lives digging through middens, but the author's greatest failing from an urban planner's perspective is the almost complete lack of discussion of waste. He does mention roads being blocked by waste toward the end of human occupation in Teotihuacan, but he doesn't mention what was done with that waste when it wasn't being used as a defensive barrier. Nor is there any real discussion of human waste, which absolutely has to be dealt with to avoid the kinds of diseases that are particularly devastating in an urban environment. Now, cities produce both waste and feces in tremendous quantities every day, and I mean quantities that are near impossible to move in a culture without wheeled vehicles and draft animals. So how did the Teotihuacanos get rid of it, and where did it go?

It's tempting to shake my head and simply assume that the research hasn't been done yet to answer most of these questions, but then I consider what I think of as an absolute howler: the notion that large human populations may have lived in major structures without any capacity for storage or cooking. The only way that can be done is if there is a barracks of cooks and porters nearby, each of the residents got delivery of food, clothing and other necessaries from somewhere near by, or if there were never populations living in those structures in the first place. This leads me to believe that the author's main problem as a researcher and analyst is that he simply does not ever think in terms of logistics - at least beyond the logistics of running an archeological dig.

Again, if you just want to know about the physical objects found at Teotihuacan and you don't mind wading through a bit of archeologically erudite speculation, then this book may suit your needs. For myself, the mere existence of pot sherds alone isn't particularly interesting, and if I have to listen to one more lunatic with a PhD warble the same old tired nonsense ("I don't know what it is, so it must be of religious or heirarchical significance!") I'm liable to club the next academic I see like a baby seal.
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Carol L. Navarrete
5.0 out of 5 stars There is no ego in this book - rare for ...
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2016
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There is no ego in this book - rare for a noted archaeologist/anthropologist. Limitations are clearly expressed, data is clearly organized and presented to be accessible to anyone interested in Teotihuacan. The research, findings, and discussion are first rate.
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Cliente de Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful review of tons of archaeological work
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2018
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A cogent book on a complex subject
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NightOwl
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2017
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Exellent work done on Teotihuacan.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Celeste TG
5.0 out of 5 stars Completo
Reviewed in Mexico on January 19, 2024
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Un trabajo bastante completo e importante para tener un acercamiento de lo que fue Teotihuacan. Un libro que vale mucho la pena.
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Pillowtail
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent review of current state of knowledge
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 23, 2017
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Excellent book to read whilst visiting Teotihuacan. I was there for five days and the up to date reporting made my experience there immeasurably richer.
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Cliente de Amazon
4.0 out of 5 stars Muy buen libro
Reviewed in Mexico on January 19, 2021
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Muy completo, me gusto mucho
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Steve
4.0 out of 5 stars An informative balanced explanation of Teotihuacan and its culture
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2016
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A very well written book. Cowgill looks at varied arguments and identifies the bases for his conclusions. As someone who favours the expansionist view of Teotihuacan's history, I think he makes reasoned argument.
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