Pyramids, Mountains, and Sight Lines

Teotihuacan’s distinctive urban grid has long attracted scholarly investigation. This essay examines several aspects of how the monumental core and its relationship to surrounding mountains changed over time. Specifically, it discusses how two of the most notable geomantic alignments at Teotihuacan—that of the Moon Pyramid with Cerro Gordo and that of the Sun Pyramid with Cerro Patlachique—were gradually refined over the centuries. Marvin Trachtenberg’s model for premodern design processes, called Building-in-Time, with its emphasis on continual redesign, concatenation, and retrosynthesis, serves as analytical framework. First, the essay argues that the location of the front stair of the Moon Pyramid remained fixed in successive reconstructions of the building because it frames a particular visual relationship between the Sun Pyramid and Cerro Patlachique behind it. Second, it presents a north-south alignment between the summits of the Moon and Sun Pyramids that developed as the Moon Pyramid was enlarged. Finally, it considers how the structures of the Moon Plaza helped eclipse the view of Cerro Gordo during the final phases of the Moon Pyramid’s history. These sight lines shaped the viewers’ embodied experience in ways that reinforced social hierarchies, reminding us that monumental architecture in Teotihuacan’s center not only unified its subjects but also reified distinctions among them

Archaeology · Art · Cartography · Concatenation (mathematics · Front (military · Geography · Geometry · Pyramid (geometry · Sight · Viewshed analysis · Visual arts · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Architecture