Beneath Your Feet

It's obvious that the main square in Mexico City is old. The cathedral and buildings ringing the square date from Spanish colonial days; and the stones from which these buildings are constructed from speak of earlier days, because of course many of these stones were from the glorious Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, ripped down after the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. You come to realize what it means that Mexico City is the oldest continually occupied city in the Americas.

I went to Mexico city in 1985, a few years after the amazing discovery--obvious in retrospect--that a few inches under the plaza, vast ruins of Tenochtitlan had remained undisturbed and unnoticed for four hundred years. Some careful excavation produced portions of the Templo Mayor itself (details shown above and below; photos by me), the main pyramid of the Aztec city. Other excavation revealed treasure troves of statues and artifacts.

Mexico is not the only place where the monumental past is literally beneath your feet. Elsewhere I've read that in the flat portions of both Iraq and large swathes of the American midwest, any rise or hill is not likely to be a natural formation, but the remnant of a Mespotamian ziggurat in the Iraqi case, or an Indian temple mound or burial mound in the American one. I guess there's a lesson there about what we think of as permanently important.

Pyramid of the Sun

Teotihuacan is probably the most amazing place I've ever been. It's the stone ruin of a city's central plaza dating from before Aztec/Nahuatl civilization just outside the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan that is today Mexico City. That makes it at least a thousand years old. While dominated by two huge pyramids, so-called the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, the plaza is surrounded by dozens of smaller pyramids, temples, and galleries.

Having been born in Mexico I was curious as an adult to return: I did so in 1985, when I visited Teotihuacan and took this photo. I don't remember what time of year it was, but it was dry and hot. There were these dried plants all over the place that had tiny seed pods hanging from them: walking through them sounded like walking through a field of tiny bells as the brittle seed pods shook and rattled. It was almost like hearing the echo of the place's ancient sounds while walking on the broad avenues below the pyramids. The pyramids themselves are steep, but accessible. There were plenty of tourists there but the place was not overwhelmed; in any case it would be hard to imagine that the scale of the place wouldn't dwarf even the largest tourist invasion.

It's sort of remarkable that these man-made mountains are just there. They're simultaneously symbols of both permanence and impermanence. The nation that made them is long gone, but the world that inherited them is left to confront their meaning. Visiting Teotihuacan is a little bit like visiting a cemetery in that the place itself is sort of other-worldly and hallowed. Nobody's likely to build a skyscraper next door, and McDonald's isn't likely to build a concession stand on the top of one of the pyramids.