Pre- Columbian people, who as yet have not been indentified, began to build an extraordinary example of planned urban development. They called it Teotihuacan (‘Place of the Gods’), it was situated in a fertile offshoot of the Valley of Mexico, north-east of modern Mexico City, In the fifth century AD, when Teotihuacan was at its height, most of the it built along in impressive causeway, lying north to south, it was the greatest city and Meso-America.
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During the building to Teotihuacan, two large pyramid temples were erected that conformed to a formal grid pattern layout, which may have been of astronomical significance. The Pyramid of t he Moon stood at the northern end of the great causeway, the Avenue of the Dead, while further south, the rather larger Pyramid of the Sun was located. Like all of Teotihuacan’s temples, however, these ave disappeared, but enough remains of the ziggurat on which the Temple of the Sun was built, and of ceremonial plaza that surrounds it must have been.
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The ziggurat of the Temple of the Sun consisted of a core of earth, faced with a local red volcanic stone and plastered with lime. It measures roughly 735ft (225m) on each of its four sides the base, rising, by way of five great steps with sloping sides, to a height of 240ft (73m). On the west side, facing the Avenue of the Dead, a grand staircase rises from three stepped terraces up to the temple platform.
The great city, which the Aztecs of Peru believed had been built by the gods, was sacked by the Toltecs in about 650.
Mesa Verde Colorado, U.S.A. AD 600-1300
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The Pueblo people, of south-west America, first appeared in Utah, and gradually migrated westwards into south-western Colorado, taking with them their distinctive black-and-white pottery, their careful ways of managing and conserving water, and their building methods. From about AD700 onwards, they began to modify their typical round, excavated pithouses, which they entered from above, and began to build summer houses above ground. These were constructed from hand-cut sandstone and abode (mud) mortar, the party walls set close together and arranged around irregularly-shaped plazas. By about 1000, the Pueblo had transformed their remaining pithouses into kivas or sacred and social gathering places.
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By the time famous Mesa Verde cliff site came to be inhabited, the villages, or ‘pueblos’, had become intricate and densely-packed places used for communal living. But because of its sheer, wind-eroded cliffs, the Mesa Verde seemed to offer better shelter, sufficient water, and agricultural land on its green (verde) table-top (mesa), and the cliffs were a defence from marauding Navajo and Apache Indians.The ground floors of the pueblo houses, now built into the cliffs, had neither doors nor windows, and access to the upper floors was by way of ladders, which could be hauled up in an emergency.
Mesa Verde was abandoned early in the 14th century, probably because there was insufficient water to serve a community that , by now, had grown very better access to water now came to be preferred.
READ full article: Ancient Technology: Unexplained Mysteries of Pyramid of The Sun and Mesa Verde
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