Collaborative Visions of Power in Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya

The early centuries of our current era witnessed two extraordinary breakthrough developments in Mesoamerica: the Classic Maya tradition of calendrically inscribed dynastic stone monuments in an eastern region encompassing more than 100,000 km, and in the west the establishment of the calendrically designed center of Teotihuacan in what would become an orthogonally planned city influencing much of highland Mexico. These coeval developments included significant interaction between leaders and sages east and west. We explore the prospect these transformations evinced collaboration between sages and leaders bridging distance and culture, defining this shared world and influencing all participants in it for the rest of history.

Calendar notation was centuries old in 292 CE when the earliest known Maya Classic stela was dedicated at Tikal, and Nixtun Ch’ich’ was an orthogonal lowland Maya center centuries before Teotihuacan, but the coeval establishment of dominant and signal Early Classic expressions of power at the eastern and western ends of the Mesoamerican world was transformative.

We explore the prospect that this cooccurrence was the historical realization of a collaboration between sages who journeyed broadly, resided in each other’s distant homelands, and, in concert, thought about the materialization of time as divine power wielded by human leaders. Like the Council of Nicaea in the Mediterranean World, such a collaboration, we suspect, may have set the subsequent trajectory of history in Mesoamerica.

The prospect of this collaboration, which has been previously also identified as a conquest by Teotihuacan lords of Tikal and the establishment by those lords of a New Order in Maya country, raises significant questions regarding the nature of hegemony and polity organization in this era of Mesoamerica.