Word: pyramidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fate of the ancient rulers of Teotihuacan are a mystery to this day. But thanks to a discovery made this fall by an international research team, that mystery may finally be starting to unravel. In mid-October, archaeologists stumbled across a burial chamber deep inside Teotihuacan's massive Pyramid of the Moon. Inside they found a skeleton and more than 150 artifacts probably dating to about A.D. 150. It is, exults anthropologist Michael Spence of the University of Western Ontario, "a fantastic find...
Until the 1960s, no one realized that Teotihuacan's great Avenue of the Dead, anchored at its northern end by the Pyramid of the Moon and flanked by the even larger Pyramid of the Sun and other ceremonial buildings, was the core of a much larger metropolis. Indeed, at 8 sq. mi. and with an estimated population of 150,000, Teotihuacan was the largest city in Mesoamerica in its heyday (about A.D. 500) and one of the six largest in the world--larger even than Rome. Its political power reached all the way to Mayan city-states hundreds of miles...
...celebrated painted murals don't provide many clues either. "There are very few glimpses of daily life," complains Arizona State University anthropologist George Cowgill. The best information scientists have to date comes from a series of mass graves discovered about a decade ago in the so-called Feathered Serpent Pyramid by Cowgill, his Arizona State colleague Saburo Sugiyama and Ruben Cabrera of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. Most of the 150 skeletons found there were buried with their hands and feet bound, suggesting that they had been sacrificed; most of them were also dressed as soldiers...
Then, last year, Sugiyama and Cabrera decided to tackle the Pyramid of the Moon. Like most Mesoamerican pyramids, this one was built like an onion. Explains Cowgill: "They would build a small pyramid, then build a larger one over it and then build a third one after that." As a result, the interior is almost solid dirt and rubble, with no distinct passageways. This makes the going slow and expensive. It took the archaeologists 3 1/2 months to reach the burial chamber, which is about 90 ft. inside the pyramid...
...more than a year in advance. Whenever there was a small opening, Morita would immediately and strategically fill it by arranging a meeting with someone he wanted to become acquainted with or catch up with. Unlike so many executives who remove themselves from the rest of the corporate pyramid, he was always in the middle of the action...