Duo Thinks They've Cracked Teotihuacan's Baffling Symbols

Archaeologists are taking a fresh stab at deciphering the mysterious symbols of Teotihuacan, an ancient city in central Mexico that flourished centuries before the Aztecs. The city's writing system, found on murals and pottery, has confounded researchers for decades, but a new study is sparking fresh debate. Archaeologist Christophe Helmke and linguist Magnus Pharao Hansen, both from the University of Copenhagen, branched out in their approach to the puzzle. Instead of attempting translation based on Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs, they turned to a reconstructed version of an older tongue, Uto-Aztecan, pieced together from the languages it spawned a millennia later, including Nahuatl, Cora, and Huichol, per Phys.org.

The researchers, who believe Teotihuacan's symbols can have direct meanings but also obscure ones based on the sounds of the words of the objects pictured, say they've identified promising interpretations for a few symbols and have about 18 other interpretations they're confident in. The research, published in Current Anthropology, is drawing praise for its creativity but also skepticism. Some experts question the reliability of the findings, citing the ambiguous nature of the symbols and the city's likely linguistic diversity. "I think it's a proposal that needs to be tested much further," archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin tells the New York Times.

The small number of surviving texts from Teotihuacan—about 300—makes the work challenging compared to the wealth of material available for deciphering Mayan or Aztec scripts. But as University of Michigan archaeologist Joyce Marcus points out, every new effort draws more attention to the puzzle, even if definitive answers remain elusive. Helmke and Hansen acknowledge the obstacles—"it would be great if we could find the same signs used in the same way in many more contexts," Hansen tells Phys.org—but remain optimistic, noting that less than 5% of the vast site has been excavated. As more artifacts come to light, future archaeologists may get closer to cracking Teotihuacan's code.