The metropolis of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico (AD 150-650) was the first planned multiethnic urban center of the Classic period. It was an exception in Mesoamerica due to its size (ca. 20 square kilometers), its multiethnic population (with people from the Basin of Mexico, Michoacán in Western Mexico, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Chiapas, etc.), and its dual organization (corporate at the base and summit, and exclusionary in the middle). This talk will present 50 years of interdisciplinary projects and my view on how this exceptional metropolis, the capital of a first generation state based on multiethnic alliances, came into being:
1. how it housed the working population;
2. how it organized a caravan system to bring to each neighborhood qualified migrants,foreign raw materials and sumptuary goods;
3. how it was headed by a ruling council, not a single rulers as seen elsewhere in Mesoamerica, and
4. how it collapsed by 550-570 CE due to an internal revolt, which coincided with avery long drought period.
After its fall, different Epiclassic and Posclassic groups lived inthe valley. The neighborhood coordination centers managed by the intermediate elite were in charge of the supply of basic subsistence goods through the tianguis (weekly market) disposed in an open ground attached to each neighborhood center; they also organized the provisioning of foreign goods, raw materials and migrant labor through the caravan system which traveled through ally sites in specific corridors towards particular regions of Mesoamerica. Each neighborhood constituted an economic, social, and symbolic unit similar to a “house society”. The contradiction between these two organizations: an orthodox, austere ruling elite, and a competitive wealthy intermediate elite had no solution. A revolt dated by 550-570 CE seems to be the response of the neighborhoods towards the ruling elite when the Teotihuacan state seemed to have tried to control the excessive autonomy of the neighborhoods. It coincided with the outset of a long-lasting drought that continued during the Epiclassic period. All the scenarios of the ruling elite along the Street of the Dead were destroyed and burned.
