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of the city was a sacred precinct, surrounded by a wall and containing the great temples of the city, a ball court, and a “skull-rack”—a structure that contained the skulls of tens of thousands of sacrificial victims skewered on wooden stakes. All buildings were dominated by a huge pyramid topped by twin temples: one was the house of the Aztec rain god, Tlaloc; the other, that of Huitzilopochtli, the war god and patron of the Aztec people.

Outside the precinct wall, but still at the heart of the city, were the palaces of the various Aztec emperors. Beyond these were the houses of the nobles and commoners laid out in a grid with canals serving as streets (many of the Spanish conquerors compared Tenochtitlán most favorably with Venice). The city was divided into quarters, each quarter was divided into smaller units called calpulli, and by all accounts, the city was very clean, orderly, and efficiently run. The great market of the Aztecs was in another city, Tlatelolco, immediately to the north of Tenochtitlán. There, some 60,000 people would pour into the market to exchange wares brought in from every corner of the empire.

After conquering the Aztecs, the Spaniards razed the city and began to build their own capital of New Spain—the city now called Mexico City. The Spaniards reduced most of the beautiful Aztec buildings to rubble, reusing many of the stones in their own constructions. Even so, the rubble reached in some parts to a height of three to four meters, which means that in many parts of Mexico City there are preserved remains of Tenochtitlán. Almost any deep excavation in the central part of the city will reveal such remains, and in 1968, excavations to extend Mexico City’s subway system uncovered a perfectly preserved Aztec temple. It was kept as the centerpiece of the Pino Suárez subway station.

In 1978, a huge carved stone was found by electrical workers in central Mexico City. The stone was decorated with the relief of an Aztec moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui, sprawled dead and dismembered on the ground. In fact, the Coyolxauhqui stone was at the base of a stairway leading to the temple of Huitzilopochtli and recalled the Aztec myth telling how Huitzilopochtli killed his half-sister Coyolxauhqui, dismembered her, and threw her body down from Coatepec (Snake Hill). The Aztec Great Temple of Tenochtitlán, then, was the physical reconstruction of Coatepec, with the broken body of Coyolxauhqui at its base.

Subsequent excavation of the Great Temple has revealed the way in which the structure was enlarged over the years, each construction being larger and more elaborate in direct reflection of the growing fortune of the empire. The Great Temple was the ritual heart of the empire, and it was at the very center of Tenochtitlán.

Peter Mathews

Teotihuacán

A huge ancient city that dominated central mexico for most of the first millennium a.d., Teotihuacán is located in the northeastern part of the basin of Mexico, about forty kilometers northeast of modern Mexico City.

In 1500 b.c., the basin of Mexico was dotted with small agricultural villages. Gradually, some of these villages grew in size and local power, a process that culminated in the dominance of just one city, San Cuicuilco, which today lies underneath Mexico City’s southern suburbs. By 300 b.c., San Cuicuilco had an estimated population of more than 10,000 people—perhaps one-third of the basin’s entire population. At the time, the vast majority of the population of the basin of Mexico was in the south. The northern half of the basin (which was generally drier and more prone to frosts and which also had saltier lakes than those in the south) was relatively unpopulated, although some small agricultural villages were beginning to farm the Teotihuacán region in the northeast. The pattern was soon to change, however: the villages in the Teotihuacán region grew rapidly (in part perhaps owing to