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KENNETH G. HIRTH, DAVID M. CARBALLO, AND BARBARA ARROYO (EDS.), 

2020, Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City. Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia and 

Colloquia, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. ISBN: 978- 

088402-4675. 528 pp. 

 

Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City is a scholarly coffee-table size volume of 15 chapters, 

written by two dozen authors, and is the result of a Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia 

symposium which brought together specialists in art and archaeology to develop a synthetic 

overview of the urban, political, economic, and religious organization of a strategic power in 

Classic-period Mesoamerica. It provides the first comparative discussion of Teotihuacan’s foreign 

policy with respect to the Central Mexican Highlands, Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Maya Lowlands and 

Highlands. Contributors discuss whether Teotihuacan’s interactions were hegemonic, diplomatic, 

stylistic, or a combination of these or other social processes. The authors draw on recent 

investigations and discoveries to update models of Teotihuacan’s history CE 100-650, in the 

process covering various questions about the nature of Teotihuacan’s commercial relations, 

political structure, military relationships with outlying areas, the prestige of the city, and the 

worldview it espoused through both monumental architecture and portable media. 

The volume is organized into an “Introduction” by the three editors (Chapter 1); three Parts: I “The 

Organization of Teotihuacan Society” (Chapters 2–4); II “Iconography at Teotihuacan and 

Abroad” (Chapters 5–7); and III “Teotihuacan Outside the City” (Chapters 8–15); “Discussion” 

(Chapter 16); a list of “Contributors”; and a valuable, detailed “Index.” Each chapter has its own 

“References Cited” rather than a conflated compilation, so that each chapter stands alone as a 

publication. 



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In the initial chapter, the editors discuss the development of Teotihuacan commencing with its 

cultural influence throughout Mesoamerica and correctly note that that our knowledge of its past 

has emphasized more about the urban center than its role as a state. The cultural phases, evidence 

of foreign enclaves, and direct and indirect contact with further distant polities for commerce, 

pilgrimages, political alliances, and militarism are reviewed. 

In Part I, Michael Smith considers Teotihuacan as an international cosmopolitan city with evidence 

of neighborhoods of foreigners, and a distributor of foreign goods, plus foreign writing and artistic 

styles. He contends that Teotihuacan was a “world city” like Imperial Rome. David Carballo 

reviews its political organization beginning in the Late Preclassic, citing models, mechanisms, the 

evidence for sacred precincts, urban governance, and social inequality polycentric organization 

within the barrios. Kenneth Hirth examines the internal economy of the city (notably obsidian 

sources and craft activities) and details Teotihuacan’s long-distance trade as a collaborative, 

cooperative, and commercial enterprise involving the intermediate elite. 

The chapters on iconography include the Nawa Sugiyama et al. assessment of Teotihuacan-Maya 

Interactions from the Plaza of the Columns Complex in the Teotihuacan ceremonial center, 

particularly Maya murals with mythological creatures and offerings of high-quality Maya-made 

ceramics dated AD 300-350. In another chapter, Mathew Robb reviews Gulf Coast evidence, 

including stela, slate discs, and pyrite mirrors, the latter which became elite mortuary offerings. 

Diana Magaloni-Kerpel and her associates focus on ceramic vessels and wall murals from elite 

residential compounds and uses in burials, offerings, and caches. They analyzed pastes, finishes, 

and pigments (reds and greens) using X-ray, pXRF, PLM, SEM-EDS, and Raman, and SEM-EDS 

analyses. 

In Chapters 7, the late Deb Nichols (1952-2022) characterizes Teotihuacan as a primate city, and 

its architecture, pottery (imported wares such as Thin Orange and Granular), and craft production, 

and hinterlands as components of state polity. She assessed the evidence for residential workshops, 

hydraulic cultivation, transportation corridors, and the corporate commercial model proposed by 

Hirth with intermediate elites governing neighborhoods. Mexican archaeologists Gabriela 

Uruñuela y Ladrón de Guevara and Patricia Plunket examine the relationships between the city-

state of Cholula and Teotihuacan starting with the Middle Formative period and trade in 

commodities to illustrate relationships between the two polities. They also examine the 



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chronological growth sequences of Teotihuacan’s Moon Pyramid and the Great Pyramid at 

Cholula. Agents and political and economic interaction networks between Teotihuacan and the 

Gulf Coast are documented by Wesley Stoner and Marc Marino. Four divergent networks were 

characterized using ceramics, iconography, lapidary, and mortuary evidence. Gary Feinman and 

Linda Nicholas assess Teotihuacan-Oaxaca models of exchange interaction, notably foreign in-

migration, social emulation, commercial relations, and political alliances. They also examine 

Teotihuacan’s external trade expeditions as related to chronologies and calendrics.        

Marcello Canuto and Ernesto Arredondo explore binary opposites: foreign conquest versus elite 

emulation, in Teotihuacan and the Maya Lowlands as seen in stelae and obsidian sources at the El 

Achiotal ruins in the northwest Peten, Guatemala, and argue that the Lowland Maya were not 

integrated into the Teotihuacan Empire. Next, Claudia García-Des Lauriers examines cacao, copal 

incense, jade artifacts, tropical bird feathers, and obsidian as major objects of in the economic 

interactions between Teotihuacan and the southeastern Pacific Coast of Mesoamerica. The Los 

Horcones and Montaña sites are proposed as hubs of economic exchange and religious practices. 

Barbara Arroyo focuses on relationships between Teotihuacan and the Guatemalan sites of 

Kaminaljuyu, and Escuintla, and the Maya Highlands’ trade and sociopolitical connections. The 

local Maya adopted Teotihuacan customs in architecture and ceramics, and other parallels include 

landscape manipulation, water control for cultivation, building and offerings, and multiethnic 

enclaves. Michael Smith suggests models that enable scholars to better appreciate the significance 

and implications of the rich data of archaeology, epigraphy, and art history presented in the other 

chapters of this book. He suggests a three-stage procedure that can help create a better scholarly 

understanding of Teotihuacan and its role in Classic period Mesoamerica.  Lastly, he presents case 

studies and characterizes the Teotihuacan Empire.  

In the final chapter, William Fash provides a detailed, substantive review of the conference papers, 

and critiques and expands some concepts presented by other contributors. Teotihuacan residents 

and corporate groups abroad suggest new models of the organization of commerce and revisions 

to earlier thinking. He elaborates three main topics: 1) The organization of the city and relations 

with its partners which changed through space and time; 2) The origins and development of 

Teotihuacan ideology which promoted pilgrimages and commerce; and 3) Economic benefits that 

came to all parties, provided by the centripetal and centrifugal power of a market economy. 



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The editors and international contributors to Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City must be 

congratulated for producing this significant achievement in Mesoamerican archaeology and art 

history, and have established a benchmark that will likely not be succeeded in some time. The 

volume is the product of the well-attended Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposium in the 

autumn of 2017 and promptly published thereafter. The editors were the symposium’s organizers 

and selected scholars who had, and continue to conduct, substantive research at Teotihuacan and 

in regions of Mesoamerica where the Classic period polity influenced local societies’ economies 

and religious practices. The chapters present current information and propose a number of 

paradigms based upon the assembled data. Collectively, the authors have compiled a work upon 

which future research can and will be based. The volume is a valuable asset to research libraries 

and an important contribution to regional studies, and should be emulated in other areas of the 

globe. 

 

Charles C. Kolb, Ph.D., RPA. Independent Scholar. He holds a B.A. in History from the 
Pennsylvania State University and earned his Ph.D. at Penn State in Anthropology and 
Archaeology focusing on Latin America and Central Asia. From 1962-2018 he conducted 
archaeological and ecological field work in Mesoamerica, Central Asia, and Northeastern North 
America. He taught for 24 years at Penn State, Bryn Mawr, and Mercyhurst University, and retired 
after 23 years as Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). 
Kolb has conducted archaeometric analyses on ceramics since 1962, and served for 26 years as 
Associate Editor for Archaeological Ceramics with the Bulletin of the Society for Archaeological 
Sciences. Since 1965 he has authored 6 monographs, 168 articles and book chapters, 856 book 
reviews (print and internet in 69 different professional publications), and written 63 encyclopedia 
contributions. 

 

© 2023 Charles C. Kolb 

 


