The title of Teotihuacan, The World Beyond the City, an important volume edited by Kenneth G. Hirth, David M. Carballo, and Barbara Arroyo, could well serve as an object lesson in the meaningful use of the humble comma. Since the advent of concerted archaeological and art historical research on Teotihuacan, Mexico, the earlier of the two largest urban centers of Mesoamerica, the culture’s inscrutability has been in proportion to its singular significance. An abbreviated list of things unknown about the city would include its primary language, its internal social and governance structures (evaluated here by Carballo, 57–96), and why many of the city’s art forms were reproduced for and cherished by ruling elites in many distant corners of what was for Mesoamericans the known world. If a puissant and far-reaching cultural system’s internal archives had disintegrated, would scholars be able to accurately characterize what that order had been on the basis of its archaeological and artistic traces alone? That, in a sense, is one unavoidable circumstance faced by scholars of Teotihuacan.

The Hirth, Carballo, and Arroyo volume concerns material expressions of intercultural contacts related to Teotihuacan that scholars have documented within and beyond that city’s bounds. Since Alfred V. Kidder and colleagues (Excavations at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, 1946) excavated Teotihuacan-style buildings at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, which is located about 1,300 kilometers southeast of Teotihuacan, scholars of Mesoamerica have debated whether Teotihuacan expanded significantly as a political and cultural project beyond its immediate hinterlands during the Mesoamerican “Classic” period, an interval that in central Mexico, spanned from roughly A.D. 150–900, though this epoch becomes archaeologically detectable about a century later in other regions of Mesoamerica.

Because, as the volume’s editors write, “Teotihuacan had the farthest and most distributed cultural reach, of the longest duration, of any city of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica,” (21) assessments of the character of Teotihuacan “influence” number among the most fundamental for Mesoamerican studies. Whereas the last time that a pair of major edited volumes evaluating these debates appeared scholars could reasonably disagree as to whether, on the one hand, “The exceptionally wide influence of Teotihuacan was [ . . .] both a principal cause for and among the most seminal consequences of the essential unity of Mesoamerica,” (Carrasco, Jones, and Sessions, Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage: From Teotihuacan to the Aztecs, 2000, 5), or if instead, in a more minimizing vein, “ . . . the interaction lattice [of Mesoamerica] was an innovation neither of the Early Classic period nor of Teotihuacan,” (Braswell, The Maya and Teotihuacan: Reinterpreting Early Classic Interaction, 2003, 40), the new Dumbarton Oaks volume frames these debates somewhat differently. The problem as addressed here is no longer a matter of if Teotihuacan, the city, was a set of thought patterns, behaviors, and resulting material cultural expressions bounded by a single valley of the Basin of Mexico, but a nuanced series of questions stemming from the recognition that the preponderance of the available evidence—including expansions of that evidence presented in the papers collected here—indicates that Teotihuacan was not only a city, but also an entire “world beyond” that city’s bounds. Thus, the comma of the book’s title could be read to indicate that an accurate definition of Teotihuacan should encompass more than those 40 square kilometers of terrain and overlaying conurbation between the peaks known as Tenan and Patlachique.

This labor of assessing the nature of the Early Classic’s paramount power as not only a city but a hegemony is laudably carried forward by the book’s contributing authors whose research appears across three parts that are bounded by introductory and concluding chapters. The first two parts, which respectively address Teotihuacan’s internal organization and aspects of Teotihuacan arts that have been documented in the city and beyond it, consist of three chapters each. The book’s third part presents seven case studies representing a selection of the sites and regions with which Teotihuacan interacted, as well as a chapter authored by Michael Smith (463–78) concerning methodological questions that might be considered in future syntheses of the foregoing arguments. These chapters, rich in new data and illustrations, bespeak the scholarly rigor of the authors and editors, who have together crafted a volume of essays that, like the pyrite tesserae of a Teotihuacan oracular and—by Matthew Robb’s new reading—heraldic mirror, fit tightly alongside one another in fine complement to present a brilliant vision onto a world far removed from our own.

While most of the volume’s essays are archaeologically oriented, three essays offer analyses of discrete artistic corpuses that attest to relationships between the built environment and the mobility of individuals and ideas. Nawa Sugiyama and colleagues present new findings from Teotihuacan’s centrally located Plaza of the Columns group, mural and vessel fragments that bear traits of Maya artistry indicative of familiarity on the part of the artists with the conventions and canons of eastern Mesoamerican painting. New radiocarbon readings date this evidence for Maya-Teotihuacan interactions to the third or fourth century—potentially antedating the “Entrada” of Teotihuacan into the Petén region of Guatemala. Prior to this publication, there was, at best, ambiguous evidence that Maya visitors or migrants to Teotihuacan approached or indeed occupied courtly statuses while there.

Diana Magaloni-Kerpel, Megan O’Neil, and María Teresa Uriarte likewise consider both murals and ceramics, investigating technological relationships between those painting techniques employed in murals and stucco-painted ceramic vessels at Teotihuacan and in the Maya region. Stucco-painted vessels were prestige goods at Teotihuacan, and perhaps even more so at its Maya contact sites, for they have typically been excavated from among the grave furnishings of family members of the Early Classic Maya dynasties. The authors demonstrate that distinct, localized technologies and material combinations formed the bases for these four visually cognate classes of artworks.

Robb’s essay examines sculpture, though he maintains a focus on the Maya-Teotihuacan connection. He departs from the study of a composite stone ball court marker recovered from a Teotihuacan residential unit. This sculpture has figured prominently in accounts of Teotihuacan arts, and its preeminence has grown since the excavation by Vilma Fialko (“El marcador de juego de pelota de Tikal: Nuevas referencias epigráficas para el período clásico temprano,” 1988) of the Marcador within the Mundo Perdido architectural group of Tikal, Guatemala, a sculpture that incorporates a Mayan text essential for understanding the Teotihuacan “Entrada” of ca. A.D. 378. Robb suggests that a motif of interlacing scrolls found on the La Ventilla marker may signify the untied knots of object bundles carried by journeying persons from place to place, an intriguing hypothesis in light of the intensive overland movement in antiquity of goods, ideas, and people attested in the volume.

The third section of the book presents seven archaeological case studies that are arranged as a southeasterly journey from the core of the Teotihuacan influence sphere to those more distant, outlying regions where evidence for contacts, while present, becomes more difficult to interpret. Three chapters addressing the appearance of Teotihuacan cultural attributes in the Maya region signal a substantial revision to archaeological understandings of interactions between these two cultures. Marcello A. Canuto and colleagues, Claudia García-Des Lauriers, and Arroyo present arguments that Teotihuacan meaningfully impacted the southern Maya region between the second through sixth centuries through the cultivation of elite alliances, gifting, and trade, rather than through direct imperialist administration. These authors center their analyses on individual Maya city-states and prioritize the theorization of trade network and multidirectional influence models.

One striking omission from these essays is significant engagement with the human sacrificial and offertory program that began to accumulate at Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent by around A.D. 180. Many of that program’s sacrifices have osteological traits that suggest that they arrived in Teotihuacan from beyond the Basin of Mexico, including likely from the Maya region. Eastern origins are also preliminarily suspected for many of the program’s one hundred thousand object offerings, though scholars await more conclusive findings. While García-Des Lauriers rightfully acknowledges that most Teotihuacan-style artifacts recovered from the Maya Pacific coast “largely encode information about the [Teotihuacan] cult of sacred war” (416), she does not evaluate the appreciable evidence that human sacrifice was a foundational and enduring dimension of Teotihuacan’s relations with other cultures, including the Maya. Nonetheless, García-Des Lauriers opens the door to the advancement of scholarly understanding of Teotihuacan’s presence in the Maya region by proposing the relevance of considering by way of analogy the tribute folios of the sixteenth-century Codex Mendoza, which enumerate those resources of the Pacific coast that later motivated the Mexica (Aztecs) to colonize and establish tribute mandates in the region. The fruitfulness of this Mendoza analogy suggests that the “trade network” explanation of Maya-Teotihuacan contacts has, of late, perhaps been prioritized by scholars of Mesoamerica at the expense of deeper consideration of the role of tribute-gathering as a possible Teotihuacan motive for sustained contacts with the resource-abundant Maya region.

This new volume finds a contemporaneous scholarly pendant, García-Des Lauriers and Tatsuya Murakami’s (2022) edited contribution Teotihuacan and Early Classic Mesoamerica: Multiscalar Perspectives on Power, Identity, and Interregional Relations. Several eminent scholars who have done much to refine comprehension of Teotihuacan’s extra-urban interactions, including Sarah Clayton, Sergio Gómez Chávez, and Julie Gazzola, have published their emergent findings there. When these two books are read in tandem, readers may observe the groundwork for the emergence of a new scholarly synthesis: Teotihuacan was, apparently, a hegemonic, pan-Mesoamerican phenomenon that for a period of four centuries exerted influence in ways that from subregion to subregion and from century to century were highly variable in form and intensity, but which collectively serve as testament to the existence in antiquity of a cultural matrix of deep historical consequence with few viable counterparts of like agedness, duration, and scope of influence known from other regions of the world. The Hirth, Carballo, and Arroyo volume constitutes a remarkable scholarly contribution that will have lasting impacts on not only archaeological, but also, art historical, epigraphic, and economic approaches to the study of the ancestral Indigenous Americas. In other words, through the vehicle of this book, the broad scope of Teotihuacan “influence” charges ever onward.