I have spent the past 50 years thinking that the civilizations of Mesoamerica built up gradually. I thought that local chieftains built mounds with temples and tombs. As the civilizations got more sophisticated, with larger populations and better organization, larger monuments were possible.
I’ve visited Teotihuacán near Mexico City twice. I sat on the pyramids, which were built between 100 BCE and 550 CE, thinking I was sitting, if not on the apex of Mesoamerican civilization, at least on one of the peaks of the range. I’d grown up on stories that the pyramids in Egypt were built by myriad people enslaved or coerced by an absolute ruler with a sophisticated bureaucracy. I’d absorbed the idea that something similar had happened with the succeeding civilizations in Mesoamerica. I’d thought that works on the scale of Teotihuacán weren’t possible without the hierarchy.
This past week, we learned that an earlier people built a bigger monument at Aguada Fénix near the Guatemalan border. The complex — a series of nesting crosses with a long plateau and a series of canals — was built between 1050 and 700 BCE. The axes are 9 by 7.5 kilometers.
Researchers haven’t found evidence that this was the work of a great ruler. It seems that Aguada Fénix was built in a pattern that represented a common understanding of the cosmos. The possibility that the workers who built it weren’t coerced — that they came because they wanted to help build the monument and to live near it — is exciting.
To me, this is news. It’s also humbling —yet another case in which my basic understanding of the world has proven wrong.
• Source: Tekeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, et. al., “Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerican; ScienceAdvances, Vol. 11, No. 45, 5 Nov. 2025. It’s here:
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