Synopsis
Is it possible to understand the social life of a city whose language has yet to be fully deciphered? In his Fall 2025 Lecture in Criticism, Professor David M. Carballo explored this question by showing how contemporary archaeology is gradually helping scholars reconstruct the lived experience of Teotihuacan, one of the largest and most influential cities of the ancient Americas.
David M. Carballo’s scholarship focuses on Mesoamerican archaeology, particularly the prehispanic civilizations of central Mexico and the social, political, and religious structures that shaped early urban societies. Pushing back against earlier interpretations that emphasized despotic rulers or rigid state hierarchies, Carballo highlights the importance of collective action, institutional diversity, and the role of non-elite communities. He has pursued this research as Professor of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Latin American Studies at Boston University, as well as through extensive fieldwork in Mexico, Honduras, Belize, Peru, and the United States, often working collaboratively with contemporary communities to better understand ancient ones.
In his lecture, Carballo concentrated on Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Americas during its peak between roughly 100 and 600 CE. Despite its prominence today as a major archaeological site, much about the city’s social and political life remains unclear. One of the main challenges lies in the nature of the available evidence. Although Aztec-period texts and pictorial documents provide valuable clues about Teotihuacan’s religion, governance, and social institutions, they were created as much as a thousand years after the city’s decline and reflect the conditions of Spanish colonization. These sources, including for example, the General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España), compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, were produced within contexts of forced Christian conversion, linguistic mixing between Nahuatl and Spanish, and colonial power structures. This distance in time and worldview presents a fundamental challenge for understanding Teotihuacan’s earlier urban life.
The problem is further complicated by Teotihuacan’s own writing system, which remains only partially deciphered, as well as by the highly stylized imagery found in murals throughout the city. Carballo stressed the importance of interdisciplinary research in addressing these gaps. During the lecture, he referred to a study published just days earlier by Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christophe Helmke, “The Language of Teotihuacan Writing” (Current Anthropology 66, no. 5: 705–739), which argues that Teotihuacan writing encoded a Uto-Aztecan language ancestral to Nahuatl and related languages. Carballo noted that the authors’ emphasis on identifying double spellings and homophones, supported by comparative Mesoamerican linguistics, represents one of the most promising directions for future decipherment.
Beyond written evidence, Carballo emphasized the value of material culture, bioarchaeological research, and chemical analyses of human remains. While these methods do not directly reveal language, they help reconstruct the migration histories that shaped Teotihuacan as a multiethnic and likely multilingual metropolis. At any given moment, Carballo explained, as much as a quarter of the city’s population may have been born elsewhere, suggesting that five or six languages could have been spoken at the same time. This diversity reflects Teotihuacan’s long and complex history, including earlier occupations, later Toltec and Aztec engagements with the site, and its enduring significance as a sacred place.
Carballo described Teotihuacan as both a sacred and a lived city. Its painted architecture, cosmogenic murals, and glyphs –more prominent in elite residences– depict social roles and ritual activities rather than individualized portraits, reinforcing a worldview in which humans and deities worked together to sustain the cosmos. Drawing on later Aztec religious concepts, he discussed pantheism, the principle of duality embodied in creator deities, and the idea of teotl as a sacred, emergent force, concepts that align with Teotihuacan’s emphasis on cosmic cycles and collective order.
One of Teotihuacan’s most distinctive features, Carballo explained, was its residential architecture. The city’s apartment compounds housed nearly the entire population, making Teotihuacan perhaps the only known example in the premodern world where almost all residents of a large city lived in such complexes. These compounds combined domestic, ritual, and craft activities, supporting a strong household economy and enabling systems of taxation and governance. Archaeological research in areas such as the Tlajinga district reveals intensive craft production, including obsidian working and maize processing, as well as civic spaces that supported neighborhood-based social life. Carballo compared this focus on everyday urban experience to institutions like New York’s Tenement Museum, highlighting its importance for understanding community resilience and long-term investment.
Throughout the lecture, Carballo returned to the idea that Teotihuacan’s political organization cannot be understood by searching for a single ruler or royal tomb. Instead, the lack of individualized images of power, together with an emphasis on deities and cosmic order, points to a more collective form of governance. Evidence of long-distance connections, such as links to Copán in present-day Honduras, further demonstrates Teotihuacan’s central role within broader Mesoamerican networks of exchange.
Carballo concluded by emphasizing the importance of an “ensemble approach” to evidence, one that brings together archaeological data, later textual sources, iconography, linguistics, and bioarchaeological research. Studying Teotihuacan, he argued, requires sustained interdisciplinary dialogue and careful attention to the limits of each kind of evidence, particularly when engaging with a city that was at once sacred, cosmopolitan, and deeply embedded in everyday life. He also noted how Teotihuacan continues to be mobilized in modern Mexican heritage-making, from the restoration of the Pyramid of the Sun during the centennial of Mexican independence in 1910 to the symbolic use of the site during the 1968 Olympic torch relay, moments that set ancient monumental history against contemporary political struggle.
-Constanza Robles, History of Art & Architecture, December 2025