Word: teotihuacan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unlike its Mayan counterparts, though, Teotihuacan has yielded very few inscriptions, and those are in a hieroglyphic language that archaeologists have not yet been able to decipher. The city's 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...
...worth the trouble. "No one has ever found a burial of this richness intact at Teotihuacan before," says Cowgill. Among the booty: two 1 1/2-ft.-high greenstone statuettes; a couple of larger human figurines fashioned from obsidian; at least 15 double-edged obsidian knives similar to those used in sacrifices; shell pendants in the form of human teeth; pyrite disks (which served as mirrors); the skeletons of two young felines (possibly jaguars) in the remnants of a wooden cage; and the scattered bones of at least seven large birds...
...long run, the scientists say, the individual's social status and the richness of the offerings may not be as important as the burial's age, which places it in a crucial time period only a couple of centuries after the city was founded. "We know almost nothing about Teotihuacan's early political history, so [this discovery] should shed a lot more light on that," says Cowgill...
...real key to unraveling the secrets of Teotihuacan is more digging--a lot more--and Sugiyama's team is still hard at work. Despite this impressive discovery, says Cowgill, "95% of the city is still unexcavated. We're just scratching the surface...
ANDREA DORFMAN was uncovering the past in two stories she reported for this week's issue: one on an ancient skeleton found in South Africa, the other on the ruins of Teotihuacan in Mexico. "So much information is still unknown about who we are and where we came from," says Dorfman, who counts archeology as one of her passions. "As long as researchers continue to find information that adds to our understanding, I think people will be fascinated." The head reporter for TIME's science sections, Dorfman joined us in 1985 after working at a scientific magazine with Michael Lemonick...