On August 19–20, the Santa Fe Institute hosted Collaborative Visions of Power in Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya, a working group that brought together archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and astronomers. Participants explored how two great cultural centers of Mesoamerica — Teotihuacan in central Mexico, and the lowland Maya, spanning parts of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras — influenced one another across centuries, and how those interactions reshaped ideas of power, time, and even architecture.
The meeting builds on more than a decade of Maya-focused gatherings at SFI, which produced books such as Maya E Groups: Calendars, Astronomy, and Urbanism in the Early Lowlands (2017) and The Materialization of Time in the Ancient Maya World (2024). A third volume entitled Being Maya in Mesoamerica: People, Places, and Power will be submitted for publication in January 2026. While previous meetings focused on the Maya world, this year’s widened the lens to include Teotihuacan, opening new conversations about collaboration, hegemony, and the symbolic systems that bound distant societies together across the cosmic path of the sun — from the eastern lowlands, where it rose, to Teotihuacan in the west, where it set.
“The Teotihuacan–Maya relationship was a fluorescence of complexity,” says co-organizer David Freidel, a professor of archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. “It had pulses of connectedness when people perceived themselves as part of something larger and more engaged with each other than in the periods between.” He emphasized that Mesoamerica was a “self-defining world, intensely interacting inside itself,” unlike the Old World civilizations, which were continually reshaped by external influence. This perspective framed the meeting’s central theme: how collaboration, rather than conquest alone, shaped ancient Mesoamerican civilizations.
Archaeologist and co-organizer Anne Dowd added another dimension, focusing on how institutions shaped early urban societies. “Teotihuacan was a religious pilgrimage center, drawing people from all over Mesoamerica for astronomically timed rituals to connect newly installed leaders to ancient cosmic ideals in calendar cities,” she said. “Emerging full-time specialists were game changers who elevated intellectual capital, economic wealth, and political power.”
SFI Trustee and co-organizer Jerry Murdock highlighted how new technologies are transforming the field. “The word 'Mesoamerica' is no longer just a matter of geography — it’s about people,” he said. Portable LiDAR mapping has created a fire hose of data, he says, revealing hidden sites and reshaping long-standing debates. The meeting also included updates from Arlen, Diane, and Adrian Chase, a husband, wife, and son team who pioneered the use of LiDAR at Caracol, Belize, and recently discovered a royal tomb there, identified as belonging to the city’s first ruler, Te K’ab Chaak. Their findings also suggest that Caracol’s rulers were already entwined with Teotihuacan centuries earlier than once thought, underscoring the complex, multilayered networks that linked Mesoamerica’s great centers.
The discussions will contribute to a forthcoming book aligned with this meeting’s theme. As with previous books, the goal is to integrate new findings while framing bigger questions: how power emerges, how it is symbolized and shared, and how complexity shapes the evolution of civilizations.
Read more about the working group: Collaborative Visions of Power in Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya