4).
The other structures of Teotihuacan use the same architectural language in varying forms and to differing scales. Residential buildings stand upon platforms and are arranged around depressed courtyards; palaces follow a pattern of low buildings arranged around columned patios, creating a unified, enclosed form; ceremonial structures use the talus-and-tablero profile and large flat platforms. The earliest period of construction was the most austere, with little decoration, but later structures - from around 300 a.D. - are marked by decorative friezes and other sculpture, and traces of painted decoration.
The architectural influence of Teotihuacan can be seen throughout Central America in the Classic period and later. The economic importance of the city was echoed in its cultural and religious influence, seen in the wide dissemination of the Feathered Serpent, originating with Teotihuacan's Quetzalcoatl, as a symbol of religious and political authority throughout Mesoamerica. The basic form of the Teotihuacan temples, the flat-topped pyramid using the talus-and-tablero configuration, with the latter providing scope for decorative and symbolic sculpture, is found throughout the region by the third century a.D., for example Kaminaljuyu in the Guatemalan highlands, Tikal in the Maya lowlands, and Matacapan in southern Veracruz, is outlined, and was later revived by the Aztec civilization. The significance of the form in linking sky to earth, its embodiment of the concept of a quadrilateral sacred space, and its imposing nature, established it as a primal form of religious and symbolic architecture in pre-Columbian central America. Elsewhere the rigid planning of Teotihuacan did not always find an echo - Maya cities, for example, are more sinuous and organic - but the carefully judged relationship between temples and sacred roadways found at Teotihuacan are taken up at Tikal and elsewhere.
There is no , Maya and Andean Peoples (London: Penguin, 1962).
Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.C., and Jeremy a. Sabloff, Ancient Civilizations: the Near East and Mesoamerica (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979).
Robertson, Donald, Pre-Columbian Architecture (London: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
The Pyramid of the Sun
The Pyramid of the Moon
Temple of Quetzalcoatl
Aerial view of Teotihuacan showing the Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramid of the Moon (foreground) and the Pyramid of the Sun (left middle).
C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and Jeremy a. Sabloff, Ancient Civilizations: the Near East and Mesoamerica (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979), pp. 284-5.
George Kubler, the Art and Architecture of Ancient America: the Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 25.
Lamberg-Karlovsky and Sabloff, Ancient Civilizations, p. 287.
Annabeth Headrick, Rex Koontz and Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Landscape and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), p. 176.
Jeff Karl Kowalski, Mesoamerican Architecture as Cultural Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 86.
Kowalski, Mesoamerican Architecture, p. 82.
Kubler, Art and Architecture of Ancient America, p. 27.
Donald Robertson, Pre-Columbian Architecture (London: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 26-8.
Kowalski, Mesoamerican Architecture, p. 94.
Kowalski, Mesoamerican Architecture, p. 77, 98-100, 132.
Headrick, Koontz and Reese-Taylor, Landscape and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, p. 259.
Connor, Mallory McCane. Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995. A www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=91043982 Roth, Leland M. A Concise History of American Architecture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980. A www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001802433 White, Janet R. "The Ephrata Cloister: Intersections of Architecture and Culture in an Eighteenth-Century Utopia." Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000): 57. A www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=110539831 Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, "6 From Teotihuacan to Tenochtitlan Their Great Temples," trans. Scott Sessions, Mesoamerica's Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to
It is impossible to know when we look back on the city now exactly where ideas first came from, that is, if ideas and practices came from Teotihuacan and then spread to other cities or came first from other cities and then spread to Teotihuacan afterwards. What we can know is that many of the features that existed in Teotihuacan were also present in other cities. Because Teotihuacan was the
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