Beyond Dichotomies. Teotihuacan and the Mesoamerican Urban Tradition

The paper considers the position of Teotihuacan within the Mesoamerican urban tradition, trying to overcome a too strict dichotomy opposing Central Mexican large, nucleated, highdensity cities and Lowland dispersed, low-density ones as urban manifestations of a similar dichotomy contrasting highly centralized vs. segmentary polities. The paper takes into examination Teotihuacan’s mural paintings, the interpretive potential of which has been neglected in studies dealing with Mesoamerican urbanism. The new analysis aims at demonstrating that mural paintings provide interesting hints to understand a key aspect of the urban form: the function of intermediate political bodies within Teotihuacan institutional framework. This is achieved also through a comparison between Classic Teotihuacan pictorial imagery and Late Postclassic Nahua hieroglyphic writing and literary genres, which suggests the existence of shared forms of conceiving and expressing political relations. On this basis, the paper argue that Teotihuacan urban form could have expressed the inner articulation of a political system much less centralized than usually thought.