Introduction

Mesoamerica includes most of today’s Mexico. It includes all of Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador. It includes northern Honduras and a stretch along the Pacific as far south as Costa Rica.

Mesoamerica contained the most complex societies prior to the arrival of Europeans. It reached its highest level of cultural development between 200 and 650 CE. This Classic Period includes Teotihuacan and several Maya city-states. However, between 650 and 900 CE, they lost cultural, political and commercial predominance, as well as the majority of their population. Historians and archaeologists agree that these urban centers collapsed. However, they still debate the causes. Was it a sudden collapse or a gradual downsizing?

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan—say it with me: TAY-OH-TI-WAH-CAHN—is located about 30 miles north of modern Mexico City. People first settled this area around 400 BCE. The city probably began as a humble center of pilgrimage, where the merchants of Mesoamerica gathered for religious festivities for the blessing of their trade.

By 550 CE, with over 150,000 people, it had become a major city. It was the most populous urban center in the Western Hemisphere. It was among the largest in the world. You could walk the city streets listening to the local language, Nahuatl, along with dozens of other tongues from the wider reaches of Mesoamerica, such as Zapotec, Otomí and Maya.

Teotihuacan elites were rich and powerful. We do not know if the rulers shared the same ethnicity. Most spoke an earlier form of Nahuatl, the language spoken much later in the Aztec Empire.

Although Teotihuacan is a world-renowned archaeological site, we know very little of its history. We do not even know what its inhabitants called it. When the Aztecs found this city’s astonishing ruins six centuries after its debatable “collapse,” they called it teotihuacán. It means “the place where the gods were created.” The name is a reference to the city’s large buildings, advanced culture, and mysterious past.

Its most distinctive feature is a mile-long avenue. It is lined with dozens of temples and palaces. Called the “Avenue of the Dead,” it includes the city’s three major pyramids. One, the Temple of the Sun, is the third-largest pyramid in the world (after Cholula in Mexico and Khufu in Egypt).

The Mayas

Unlike Teotihuacan, Classic Mayas didn’t pour everything into one powerful metropolis. Rather, they were a composition of several strong cities. These cities were connected to each other by their shared culture.

The cities of the Maya Classic Period were centered in today’s Guatemala. They stretched across the borders of Mexico, Belize and Honduras. These cities had some of the most beautiful monuments in the pre-Columbian Americas.

The function of these urban centers was administrative and ceremonial. They were not residential cities. The urban centers housed only the elite and all the people needed to support their power and dominant culture.

The peasants lived outside the city, in the field. Their lives were much less fancy. The work of peasants fed the urban population and also provided labor and military service to the ruling class.

The collapse of classic Mesoamerica

The word “collapse” is tricky. It’s hard to know when, why and if a complex society really collapsed. Certainly, all societies appear to have a beginning, middle and end. Yet just like stories, there are sequels and spin-offs. Scholars like to look for that single event that destroyed a particular society. It is more plausible, however, that several factors ended the story of a particular society or empire.

Indeed, it is probably because we know so little of the collapses of Teotihuacan and the Mayas that they have been the source of many myths and legends. Teotihuacan had no writing system. So, we can only read the city’s ruins.

Some scholars say the collapse of Teotihuacan was the result of war. Certainly, the remains of Teotihuacan show signs of violence. Yet, violence itself is not a sign of collapse. In the third century, the people of Teotihuacan burned their own pyramid. But the city did not decline.

Around 650 CE it looks like the city experienced new violence. Soon after, Teotihuacan began to lose its dominance in Mesoamerica. So, some call this the collapse. However, if violence did not cause a collapse in the third century, how can we say it was the sole cause this time around? Other factors, such as overpopulation, droughts and internal political divisions could easily have played a part.

The end of the Maya society somewhat later is another fascinating story. Unlike Teotihuacan, the Mayas had a written system. So we know the names of their kings. We know the exact year they came to power and when they fought wars. These stories are carved in their monuments. Yet they reveal nothing about their collapse around 900 CE. Books might have offered better clues, and the Maya left many behind. But in 1562, a Spanish friar named Diego de Landa burned every Maya book he could find. The few surviving books say nothing about their latter years.

Wait, did we say collapse? Because actually, new Maya city-states continued being built until the Spaniards arrived, and hundreds of Maya communities still exist today. So in some ways, the story is still being written.

Whatever happened in Mesoamerica between 650 and 900 CE, we know that people began to abandon its most significant urban centers. It was the end of an era, certainly, but the society didn’t vanish. The ruling class lost its capacity to rule. Yet the people continued to exist, as did their culture and their customs.