Living in Mexico City, I have visited the famous site of Teotihuacan on several occasions. It is always interesting. Even though the structures are the same old ones, each visit offers me the chance to see the place in a new light. My favorite one is not even the pyramids or the citadel, but the enigmatic Avenue of the Dead.
Visiting Teotihuacan is usually coupled with certain challenges, such as scaling the pyramids, at least up to the point we are allowed to, or avoiding the hordes of vendors, who all sell the same mass-produced trinkets and don’t care that you’ve just said “no thanks” to their competitors. And then there are the guides… Now I generally enjoy taking them up on their services to get a chance to ask questions regarding the official viewpoints of respectable archeology. Here, however, this has proved to be a bit frustrating, not even on just one occasion. And this time it’s not even my openness to ancient astronaut theory that puts me at odds with mainstream archeology. It’s simply the way the Avenue of the Dead is explained which I find completely unreasonable.
Without getting into Aliens…
The city of Teotihuacan was built between 100 BC and 25 AD, and at its peak had around 150,000 inhabitants, as can be read on Wikipedia. The major structures include the larger Pyramid of the Sun, the smaller Pyramid of the Moon, and the so called Citadel or also known as Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Although it should be mentioned that all these names were given to the buildings half a millennium after their construction, by the Aztecs and not their original builders. The same applies to the straight line of empty area, running south from the moon pyramid, past the sun pyramid, across the little river, past the citadel, and further on… deviating fifteen degrees clockwise from the astronomical North-South axis. This is known as the Calzada de Muertos or Avenue of the Dead, since according to Aztec tradition this is where the dead visitors would approach the city.
Neither for the Dead, nor an actual Avenue
Aztec legends aside, looking at the structure myself, I couldn’t help thinking that ‘avenue’ or even ‘street’ might not be the best way to describe it. Firstly, it is immensely wide, of about 40 m (131 ft), compared to all the other streets in between the buildings. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that pre-colombian cultures did not have any large vehicles at all, as they didn’t have any beasts of burden. This further reduces their need for wide avenues of the this type. So why did they build this avenue so wide? According to our guide, it was to accommodate the multitudes of visitors who would come from far-away places, for inexplicable ceremonial reasons. Okay… But if that is true, why did they build walls across their avenue, the visitors had to climb up on, using the stairs of about ten steps, and then climb down again on the other side? They wouldn’t have been very helpful to people visiting, especially, if they were carrying things, once again due to the lack of draft animals.
Water Tanks - The Alternative Explanation
But maybe this ‘avenue’ was never built as a street in the first place? Looking at it from the corners, where the edges meet the dividing walls, they look rather like pools to me. The stairs also offered an easy access to the water, even at fluctuating levels. And indeed, running under these walls are unmistakable ducts, as if put there precisely to lead the water from one tank to the other.
Asking our guide about this, she verified that those were in fact water ducts, but we were mistaken in our assumption that the avenue is a series of pools. In her view, the purpose of the ducts was to get the water away from the avenue as quickly as possible, so people could walk there. In complete contradiction to this, the guide I’d talked to at my previous visit said the pools were used to store water for irrigation. This latter idea I rejected immediately, since the size of the pools with their shallow depth exposed so much water surface to evaporation that the stored water would have quickly become too salty for irrigating plants. But what else could they’ve been used for?
Spirulina Cultivation?
As my previous visit about a year ago roughly coincided with becoming an enthusiastic cultivator of spirulina, it’s not surprising that I was convinced that these pools were made to grow this nutritious blue-green algae. And still I have not completely abandoned this idea. After all, Teotihuacan was supposedly built for obsidian mining, and what better way to feed miners than having pools of nutrient rich greenery growing right in the middle of their city? On the other hand, it is not that simple to establish and maintain the right conditions for spirulina, especially for a tank with such a large volume. The water needs a certain salinity, a certain pH, and most importantly adequate temperatures so spirulina can grow in it. Nevertheless, I think it makes a lot more sense than blindly insisting on the idea of an avenue.
Water from the Sky
Another important thing to consider is the city itself: while many of the buildings, and the surrounding area in general, are still covered by vegetation, during its peak the whole area was built up, paved, and covered with plaster. So where would the water go during the times of heavy rain, that is so typical for this area? It would naturally collect in the lowest point, which just happens to be the equally paved Avenue of the Dead. In fact, given sufficient precipitation, which the rainy season is never too short on, these pools would probably fill up to the brim. Once full, the water could be directed on to the next, and all the subsequent tanks. Even at the Citadel there is a wall surrounding the structure, offering another tank to be potentially filled up. Since the top of the smaller platform in front of the larger one is at the same level as the top of the wall, it can be assumed that once the tank is filled, the smaller pyramid would be completely submerged.
As for the purpose of this, we can only speculate. Maybe it was in fact used for spirulina, or even a number of plants, fish, amphibians, etc. emulating the ecosystem of the Texcoco lake, for example, where spirulina used to grow naturally. At least during the rainy season this would make much sense. Of course, one has to keep in mind that since we’re talking about runoff from the city, it may not be the cleanest type of water, even without diesel, tire-dust, and other chemical contaminants of our modern days. It is also debatable how long the water accumulated from the rainy months would last, and what the inhabitants would resort to during the dry season. Of course, the smooth surface of the filled tank would beautifully reflect the sky, most spectacularly at a cloudless night, which ironically is not so common during the rainy season. Otherwise, even in the daytime, it is generally pleasant to look over a pool of water in the middle of the city.
In the end, we may never know the actual purpose of these structures, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be free to speculate. I am convinced there are many interesting ideas smothered by alleged experts equally speculating in the dark, and people refusing to give up explanations based on an archaic name.
As for me, I am certain the next I visit Teotihuacan will be during a raging rainstorm, just to see how the place looks like in the rain. As much as I hate the idea of getting soaked to the bone, I think it may offer some interesting new insights.