The People Who Built Teotihuacan Told Their Story. Archaeologists Are Just Learning to Read It.

Unlike the Maya or the Aztecs, the people of Teotihuacan left no known codices or deciphered writing. Researchers didn't know what language they spoke or what later cultures they were linked to. For a city that was once the largest in the Americas, that's a gap.

Researchers Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christophe Helmke of the University of Copenhagen have published an analysis in Current Anthropology proposing that the symbols scattered across Teotihuacan's murals and ceramics are not just decorative motifs. They are writing. And they may represent an early form of a Uto-Aztecan language, ancestral to Nahuatl, Cora and Huichol, which would mean the Aztecs weren't foreign arrivals who inherited an empty city. They may have been direct descendants of Teotihuacan's builders.

The decoding required something most prior attempts skipped. Because the Uto-Aztecan language family changed so much over time, Hansen first had to reconstruct what it would have sounded like more than 1,500 years ago; only then could the researchers determine whether the mural signs fit the linguistic pattern of that early stage. The study shows that the signs share core features with other Mesoamerican writing systems, including logograms and the rebus principle, where sounds are combined from pictorial elements to form abstract words. Scribes also used what the researchers call "double spelling," pairing symbols to reinforce their sound or meaning.

It's still early days. Much of the writing remains undeciphered, and with only a small corpus of inscriptions to work from, the picture is vastly incomplete. Teotihuacan pottery with text still turns up, and the researchers say more murals will too.

The people of a pre-Aztec city told their story on dishes. Two thousand years later, archaeologists are getting to know them.

Read the full story at The Debrief, April 8, 2026

Hot Take: A retired Mesoamerican archaeologist somewhere is reading this and not saying "I told you so." But only because they have more dignity than that.