A lidar mapping study using a cutting-edge aerial mapping technology shows ancient residents of Teotihuacan moved astonishing quantities of soil and bedrock for construction and reshaped the landscape in a way that continues to influence the contours of modern activities in this part of Mexico. The work is published in the open-access journal, PLOS One.
From an article in UC Riverside News by Holly Ober.
The paper also shows how Teotihuacan’s engineers re-routed two rivers to align with points of astronomical significance, identified hundreds of previously unknown architectural features, and documented over 200 archaeological features that have been destroyed by mining and urbanization since the 1960s.
“We don’t live in the past, but we live with the legacies of past actions. In a monumental city like Teotihuacan, the consequences of those actions are still fresh on the landscape,” said first author Nawa Sugiyama, a professor of anthropology at UC Riverside.
Teotihuacan, about 25 miles northeast of modern Mexico City, was the largest city in the Americas and one of the largest anywhere in the ancient world. It existed from about 100 BCE-550 CE— about 1,000-2,000 years ago— and covered 8 square miles. At its height, it consisted of numerous pyramids, plazas, and well-designed residential and commercial neighborhoods housing a population of around 100,000. Some of the pyramids and other structures are visible above ground today, but most of the city’s remains lie buried beneath modern fields, buildings, and other activity areas.
To map the below-ground parts of Teotihuacan, Nawa Sugiyama and co-authors Saburo Sugiyama at Arizona State University; Tanya Catignani at George Mason University; Adrian S. Z. Chase at Claremont University; and Juan C. Fernandez-Diaz at Houston University used lidar, a mapping technology that measures the amount of time it takes light from a laser to bounce back from an object. Archaeologists often use lidar to discover buried features covered by dense forests or open fields but rarely deploy the technology where archaeological remains lie beneath urban areas.
“Lidar is often perceived as revolutionary tool to find ancient features hidden in plain sight, but we found the lidar map to be extremely messy and hard to interpret. Many of the features we identified were modern with ancient roots. But then we realized there is a far more interesting story behind this trend,” said Nawa Sugiyama.
Because the sheer scale of construction at Teotihuacan suggested massive modification of the ancient landscape, Sugiyama’s group thought that lidar could help elucidate the relationship between the layout of Teotihuacan and modern activities that overlay it. The researchers confirmed the lidar findings with surveys by foot and comparisons to previous mapping efforts.
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