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Archaeologists read a Teotihuacan place name and a warrior title in three glyphs from a Chalcatzingo cave
Christophe Helmke's team at the University of Copenhagen reads three red glyphs in Chalcatzingo's Cave 19 as Teotihuacan writing tied to warrior fire rites. The readings add a site beyond the city to the case for a Teotihuacan script, while the fire-ritual claim rests on soot above one rock shelf.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The glyphs were first recorded in the 1980s, and the team returned in 2022 to photograph them and use enhancement software to recover paint that had faded.
- One glyph pairs mountain signs with speech scrolls and is read as the place name Singing Mountain, the same name locals use for a hill near the cave.
- A second glyph combines a beaded necklace, a cloak and an upright dart, all items of Teotihuacan warrior attire, and the authors read it as a warrior title.
- The largest glyph, a frame of five-pointed stars, sits over a bedrock shelf beneath a blackened wall and ceiling, and the authors link the soot to burning incense or a funerary bundle.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The warrior-fire story leans on the star frame, the glyph Discover says lacks clear script ties, so the writing claim and the ritual claim have to be judged on separate evidence.
- capability Photo enhancement pulled readable detail from paint too faded to see unaided, so rock art recorded decades ago can be re-read with a camera and software, without new excavation.
- precedent A sign that matches both a hill's local name and a mural in the city sets a checkable standard that claims of Teotihuacan writing at other sites can now be held to.
The sample is three paintings, and part of one is inferred. In the mountain glyph, two signs survive and the researchers believe a third has faded away [4]. Some of the paint can no longer be made out with the naked eye [19], so the readings depend on photographs the team processed with enhancement software after its 2022 visit [2]. The paintings are in a dark red pigment, probably brushed on, in a rock shelter 0.2 miles from the center of Chalcatzingo [16]. Each glyph was then read by comparing it with known Teotihuacan writing and artwork [3].
The place name is the one reading that can be checked against evidence outside the cave. The Singing Mountain sign matches a local name for a nearby hill [5], and the same name is recorded in murals at Teotihuacan [6]. A sign that points to one named hill is encoding a word. Whether Teotihuacan's symbols did that has been debated for decades [20], though Discover reports that recent work found them to share expressive elements with Maya and Aztec hieroglyphic scripts [15]. "Teotihuacan writing can therefore no longer be dismissed or considered as a set of isolated or emblematic symbols," the authors wrote [10]. Their pilgrimage claim goes further. In their reading, the shared name could mean people travelled from the city to the hill [6].
The fire reading rests on the blackening around the star frame [8]. "We therefore hypothesize that this frame and the modified bedrock shelf served as the background and elevated base for a Teotihuacan pyrolytic ritual," the authors wrote [9]. Discover's account goes further, saying the warrior glyph indicates visitors likely came to cremate funerary bundles tied to a Teotihuacan warrior order [12]. The same account says the star frame, the glyph directly over the soot, has no clear ties to Teotihuacan script, unlike the other two [11].
Neither report says the soot was dated or its residue analysed. Soot alone does not identify who lit a fire, and different societies occupied Chalcatzingo across Mesoamerican history [14]. The site is best known for more than 50 Olmec-style carved panels from roughly 900 to 500 BCE [13]. Teotihuacan people lived there from about 350 to 550 CE, leaving ceramics as well as the glyphs [14], some 850 years after the end of that Formative period [1].
I'd expect the Singing Mountain reading to hold up best, because both the hill and the mural can be checked [5][6]. The warrior-cremation account joins a probable title painted on one glyph [7] to burning beneath another [8]. The word the authors chose for the fire ritual is "hypothesize" [9].
What to watch
- A date or residue analysis for the Cave 19 soot, to test whether the burning belongs to the Teotihuacan occupation of about 350 to 550 CE.
- Other Teotihuacan-era sites where painted signs can be matched to names recorded in the city's murals, the kind of match the Singing Mountain reading depends on.
- Replies from other Teotihuacan specialists to the authors' claim that the city's writing can no longer be dismissed as emblematic symbols.