Late persistence of human ancestors at the margins of the monsoon in India

Peer-Reviewed Publication

 

IMAGE: A HANDAXE FROM THE THAR DESERT, WHERE ACHEULEAN POPULATIONS PERSISTED UNTIL AT LEAST 177 THOUSAND YEARS AGO view more 

CREDIT: JIMBOB BLINKHORN

The longest lasting tool-making tradition in prehistory, known as the Acheulean, appears more than 1.5 million years ago in Africa and 1.2 million years ago in India, and mainly consists of stone handaxes and cleavers (Figure 1). New research led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has re-examined a key Acheulean site at the margins of the monsoon zone in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan, revealing the presence of Acheulean populations until about 177,000 years ago, shortly before the earliest expansions of Homo sapiens across Asia.

The timing and route of the earliest expansions of our own species across Asia have been the focus of considerable debate but a growing body of evidence indicates Homo sapiens interacted with numerous populations of our closest evolutionary cousins. Identifying where these different populations met is critical to revealing the human and cultural landscape encountered by the earliest members of our species to expand beyond Africa. Although fossils of ancient human populations are extremely rare in South Asia, changes in the stone tool kits they made, used, and left behind can help resolve when and where these encounters may have occurred.

The youngest Acheulean in western India

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History report the relatively recent occupation of the site of Singi Talav (Rajasthan, India) by Acheulean populations up to 177,000 years ago (Figure 2). The site was once thought to be amongst the oldest Acheulean sites in India, but now appears to be one of the youngest. Indeed, these dates show the persistence of Acheulean populations in the Thar Desert after their disappearance in eastern Africa around 214,000 years ago and Arabia 190,000 years ago. This result supports the late persistence of Acheulean populations in India, where previous research has shown their presence as recently as 130,000 years ago.

The site of Singi Talav, set on a lakeside close to the modern town of Didwana at the edge of the Thar Desert, was first excavated in the early 1980's, revealing multiple stone tool assemblages (Figure 3). The largest assemblage shows a focus on the production of stone handaxes and cleavers that are typical of the Acheulean. However, the techniques needed to accurately date these assemblages were not available at the time of their discovery. Since then, a range of sites have been examined that constrain the chronology of Acheulean occupations in India, but the ecological settings of the sites remains poorly known.

"The lakeside setting has ideal preservation conditions for an archaeological site, enabling us to return 30 years after the first excavation and readily re-identify the main occupation horizons again," says Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the lead author of the study. "We've applied a range of modern methods to re-examine this critical site, including new approaches to directly date the occupation horizons and to reveal the vegetation in the landscape that Acheulean populations inhabited."

The researchers used luminescence methods to directly date the sediment horizons occupied by ancient human populations. These methods rely on the ability of minerals like quartz and feldspar to store and release energy induced by natural radioactivity, allowing scientists to determine the last time sediments were exposed to light. 

"Ours is the first study to directly date the occupation horizons at Singi Talav, enabling us to understand both when ancient humans lived here and created the stone tool assemblages, and how these occupations compare with other sites across the region," adds Dr Julie Durcan of the University of Oxford.

At the margins of the monsoon

The Thar Desert sits at the western edge of the modern Indian summer monsoon system, and its habitability to ancient human populations likely fluctuated significantly. The researchers examined plant microfossils, known as phytoliths, as well as features of soil geochemistry to reveal the ecology of the site at the time the Acheulean toolkits were produced.

"This is the first time the ecology of an Acheulean site in India has been studied using these methods, revealing the broader character of the landscape that these populations inhabited," says Prof Hema Achyuthan of Anna University, Chennai, who also participated in the original excavations at the site. "The results from the two methods we applied complement each other to reveal a landscape rich in the types of grasses that flourish during periods with enhanced summer monsoons."

With this data, the study illuminates the environmental conditions that allowed Acheulean populations to thrive at the margins of the monsoon in the Thar Desert until at least 177,000 years ago.

"This supports evidence from across the region indicating that India hosted the youngest populations using Acheulean toolkits across the world," adds Blinkhorn. "Critically, the late persistence of the Acheulean at Singi Talav and elsewhere in India directly precedes evidence for the appearance of our own species, Homo sapiens, as they expanded across Asia."

The Thar Desert likely presented a key ecological frontier for expanding populations of Homo sapiens moving eastwards as they first met the Indian monsoon system. The results of this study suggest that this may have also been a demographic and behavioural frontier - a potential zone in which Homo sapiens encountered another, closely related, human population.

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Fires in Iceland: Human interference even 1,100 years ago

 For the first time, the analysis of an ice core taken from the east coast of Greenland, in Renland, has allowed researchers to recreate the trend of the fires that have scourged the Icelandic forests over the last five thousand years. The discovery was made by an international team led by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP). The results, which were published in the journal Climate of the Past, are a crucial contribution to the understanding of the links between fires, climate and human action.

Ice has always been the backbone of the climatic and environmental history of our planet and it allows tracing back information from past centuries and millennia about temperatures, volcanic eruptions and even fires. “The analysis of the chemical compounds found in ice cores collected in polar areas helps to recreate climate-related aspects and weather events of the past'', confirms  Andrea Spolaor, researcher at the CNR-ISP. “In this case we are talking about compounds such as black carbon, ammonium and levoglucosan, produced during biomass burning. By measuring these tracers, we found that in the high North Atlantic, which encompasses the north-east, south-east and south-west coasts of Greenland and Iceland, more than 4,500 years ago the number of fires decreased thanks to weaker summer insolation, resulting in the expansion of glaciers and and sparser vegetation”.

The researchers examined the Recap ice core (Renland ice cap) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the CNR Institute of Polar Sciences and the Centre for Ice and Climate in Copenhagen. “The climate factors that most affect fires are temperatures, summer insolation, rainfall and humidity, along with quantity and type of vegetation”, Delia Segato, researcher from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, explains. “In the presence of dense vegetation, fires typically last longer due to greater availability of flammable material”.

In addition to the climatic factors, the study also revealed that another reason why more than 1,100 years ago the number of fires decreased in the North Atlantic was due to human interference. The researchers explain that “The decrease recorded in this period is due to the loss of vegetation in the Icelandic area”. “The Viking colonisation of Iceland caused one of the first environmental disasters in history and even today, after a millennium, the Icelandic forests have not fully recovered. The Vikings deforested extensively, causing the loss of more than 25% of vegetation in less than a century. The settlers, following the customs of their native lands, used to cut down birch tree forests to collect wood and to remove the shrubs to open grazing lands”.

The human impact in the high North Atlantic continued over the centuries. The researchers conclude by stating that “In the two most recent centuries, we have found that fires have increased due to climate change and emissions caused by human activity''. “The results of the study show that regions at extreme latitudes represent one of the first places on Earth where climate change is having the most catastrophic effects. At the end of summer 2020 alone, fires in the Arctic Circle caused the emission of 244 megatons of CO2, exceeding by 35% those recorded in 2019. In these areas it is therefore essential to improve the understanding of climate trends and the history of fires”.

Jawbone of 16,000-25,000-year-old human represents first Pleistocene remains from Sulawesi; shows surprising dental wear pattern

Major gaps remain in our knowledge of the early history of Homo sapiens in Wallacea. By 70–60 thousand years ago (ka), modern humans appear to have entered this distinct biogeographical zone between continental Asia and Australia. Despite this, there are relatively few Late Pleistocene sites attributed to our species in Wallacea. H. sapiens fossil remains are also rare. Previously, only one island in Wallacea (Alor in the southeastern part of the archipelago) had yielded skeletal evidence for pre-Holocene modern humans. Here we report on the first Pleistocene human skeletal remains from the largest Wallacean island, Sulawesi. The recovered elements consist of a nearly complete palate and frontal process of a modern human right maxilla excavated from Leang Bulu Bettue in the southwestern peninsula of the island. Dated by several different methods to between 25 and 16 ka, the maxilla belongs to an elderly individual of unknown age and sex, with small teeth (only M1 to M3 are extant) that exhibit severe occlusal wear and related dental pathologies. The dental wear pattern is unusual. This fragmentary specimen, though largely undiagnostic with regards to morphological affinity, provides the only direct insight we currently have from the fossil record into the identity of the Late Pleistocene people of Sulawesi.

 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257273

What the fate of ancient cities can teach us about surviving climate change

 Cities and their hinterlands must build resilience to survive climate stress; this is the grave warning emanating from a studyof ancient civilisations and climate change.

From 900 to 1500CE, Khmer cities in mainland Southeast Asia (including Angkor) and Maya cities in Mesoamerica collapsed, coinciding with periods of intense climate variability. While the ceremonial and administrative urban cores of many cities were abandoned, the surrounding communities may have endured because of long-term investment in resilient landscapes.

“They created extensive landscapes of terraced and bunded (embanked to control water flow) agricultural fields that acted as massive sinks for water, sediment and nutrients,” said lead author Associate Professor Daniel Penny, from the University of Sydney School of Geosciences. “This long-term investment in soil fertility and the capture and storage of water resources may have allowed some communities to persist long after the urban cores had been abandoned.” He and his colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Timothy Beach, came to this conclusion via a review of relevant archaeological and environmental information from Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica.

The ruins of a temple at Angkor (IMAGE)

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

 

CAPTION

The 12th century CE temple of Preah Khan, one of hundreds of ritual and administrative spaces in the urban core of Angkor in modern Cambodia that were progressively abandoned during the 14th and 15th centuries, coincident with period of intense drought.

CREDIT

Daniel Penny.

At the ancient city of Angkor in modern Cambodia, for example, the administrative and ceremonial core was progressively abandoned over several decades, culminating in a series of catastrophic droughts in the 14th and 15th century, but the surrounding agricultural landscapes may have persisted through these episodes of climatic stress. 

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, their study provides a rough roadmap for resilience in the face of climate change.

Lessons for modern-day rural and urban areas

These historical cases of urban collapse emphasise that long-term and large-scale investment in landscape resilience – such as improving water storage and retention, improving soil fertility, and securing biodiversity – can better enable both urban and rural communities to tolerate periods of climatic stress. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes this will become more frequent and more intense in many parts of the world over the coming century.

“We often think of these historic events as disasters, but they also have much to teach us about persistence, resilience and continuity in the face of climate variability,” said Associate Professor Penny.

The indigenous population of ancient Sicily were active traders

 

IMAGE: MONTE POLIZZO. view more 

CREDIT: FOTOGRAF: J.L. BERRY

How should we relate to the traditional historiography on ancient Sicily? The prevailing view has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources. But with the aid of interdisciplinary methods, a new thesis shows that trade was a big part of the economy for the inhabitants of the settlement of Monte Polizzo.

In general, historiography concerning ancient Sicily is overwhelmingly Greco-centric, i.e. focused on its Greek immigrants. Because the indigenous population’s architectonic remains are relatively invisible, whilst those of the Greek immigrants are monumental, the accepted historiography has been that the indigenous population had neither territory, power nor economic resources. It was instead accepted that as soon as the Greeks had established themselves on the island (on the western side in 628 BCE) they colonised and controlled the majority of the Sicilian lowlands, the economy and thus also the indigenous population.

This outlook has contributed to an imbalance and a distorted picture of the role of the indigenous population – the people that Greek historian Thukydides called the Elymians – in the natural, cultural and economic landscapes of western Sicily during the Archaic period (700-500 BCE), according to Cecilia Sandström, a doctoral student in classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Gothenburg.

“My aim with the thesis was to shift the focus. The indigenous population should not be viewed as a homogeneous group but as independent actors with their own agendas, tastes and preferences.”

Monte Polizzo abandoned after a fire

The site of her study is the Elymian settlement of Monte Polizzo, situated in western Sicily and strategically positioned on a mountain, about 700 metres above sea level and around 20 km from the west coast – midway between the Phoenician settlement of Motya, the Greek settlement of Selinunte and the bigger Elymian settlement of Segesta.

“Monte Polizzo was only inhabited for 75 years, between 625 and 550 BCE. The roughly 20 hectare settlement was abandoned after a major fire that destroyed every building except the religious temple at the acropolis.”

Interdisciplinary methods

Cecilia Sandström has used interdisciplinary methods in her study. In addition to the archaeological material, which clearly shows trade contacts with the various peoples of the Mediterranean, she used palynological, macrobotanical and geomorphological analyses of the neighbouring landscape, and charted the conditions for trade at the site. A further important factor was her investigation of whether the rivers were navigable and could be used as transport routes.

“The inhabitants of Monte Polizzo were themselves active traders,” says Cecilia Sandström.

Large number of amphorae

The large number of imported transport amphorae (the two-handled vessels that were common in ancient times) deviate from the fairly modest amphorae material found at other indigenous settlements in the area. 

“A common idea in the research tradition is that the content of these imported amphorae was only for the elite, who often received them as gifts from Greeks and Phoenicians, but there is no evidence for this gift-giving system at Monte Polizzo. The findings instead show that trading was an important part of the settlement’s economy.”

A very unusual factor in comparison with Greek, Phoenician and other Elymian settlements in western Sicily is the fact that a very large number of amphorae (mostly Etruscan) are scattered across the whole settlement – not just in temples and ‘wealthy’ houses.

“The variation in the origins of the amphorae also shows that the people there had access to different networks that could be indirectly reached through the Greek and Phoenician settlements. But the study also shows that there were many opportunities for direct contacts via the rivers’ estuaries.”

Ecological and economic conditions

Studies of the ecological and economic conditions in the area investigated reveal unique findings.

“The fact that the local economy at Monte Polizzo comprised animal husbandry and agricultural products, which were possibly exported together with timber, is not surprising per se. River sediment analyses, however, show that in fact they totally deforested their surrounding area, and that they farmed the land so intensively that the fertile, humus-rich soil was completed eroded away in less than 75 years.”

Furthermore, the geomorphological studies show that large parts of the area between the west coast and the interior where Monte Polizzo was situated started to turn into marshes.

“But whether diseases such as ‘Mal’aria’, which is documented in Sicily during the 5th century BCE, were already rife as early as in the 6th century BCE cannot yet be proven. In combination with the deforestation and the less fertile soil left behind by the Elymians, this was perhaps reason enough to leave the site, and meant that it was never settled again.”

Researchers present evidence that a cosmic impact destroyed a biblical city in the Jordan Valley

In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho.

“It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at the UC Santa Barbara. “Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.”

A favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia.

But there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers, for its “highly unusual” materials. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, “bubbled” mudbrick, and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce.

“We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,” said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar Philip J. Silvia’s research effort to determine what happened at this city 3,650 years ago.

Their results are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Salt and Bone
“There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam,” Kennett said, of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth’s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga.

The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper, and the distribution of bones indicated “extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans.”

For Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals.

“I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure” Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large airburst near Tall el-Hammam. “We have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals— quartz is one of the hardest minerals; it’s very hard to shock.”

The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the “anomalously high concentrations of salt” found in the destruction layer — an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples.

“The salt was thrown up due to the high impact pressures,” Kennett said, of the meteor that likely fragmented upon contact with the Earth’s atmosphere. “And it may be that the impact partially hit the Dead Sea, which is rich in salt.” The local shores of the Dead Sea are also salt-rich so the impact may have redistributed those salt crystals far and wide — not just at Tall el-Hammam, but also nearby Tell es-Sultan (proposed as the biblical Jericho, which also underwent violent destruction at the same time) and Tall-Nimrin (also then destroyed).

The high-salinity soil could have been responsible for the so-called “Late Bronze Age Gap,” the researchers say, in which cities along the lower Jordan Valley were abandoned, dropping the population from tens of thousands to maybe a few hundred nomads. Nothing could grow in these formerly fertile grounds, forcing people to leave the area for centuries. Evidence for resettlement of Tall el-Hammam and nearby communities appears again in the Iron Age, roughly 600 years after the cities’ sudden devastation in the Bronze Age.

Fire and Brimstone
Tall el-Hamman has been the focus of an ongoing debate as to whether it could be the biblical city of Sodom, one of the two cities in the Old Testament Book of Genesis that were destroyed by God for how wicked they and their inhabitants had become. One denizen, Lot, is saved by two angels who instruct him not to look behind as they flee. Lot’s wife, however, lingers and is turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile, fire and brimstone fell from the sky; multiple cities were destroyed; thick smoke rose from the fires; city inhabitants were killed and area crops were destroyed in what sounds like an eyewitness account of a cosmic impact event. It’s a satisfying connection to make.

“All the observations stated in Genesis are consistent with a cosmic airburst,” Kennett said, “but there’s no scientific proof that this destroyed city is indeed the Sodom of the Old Testament.” However, the researchers said, the disaster could have generated an oral tradition that may have served as the inspiration for the written account in the book of Genesis, as well as the biblical account of the burning of Jericho in the Old Testament Book of Joshua.

Archaeologist helps to uncover hidden neighborhood in ancient Maya city

 Scientists have been excavating the ruins of Tikal, an ancient Maya city in modern-day Guatemala, since the 1950s — and thanks to those many decades spent documenting details of every structure and cataloguing each excavated item, Tikal has become one of the best understood and most thoroughly studied archaeological sites in the world. 

But a startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think.

Using light detection and ranging software, or lidar, Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that what was long assumed to be an area of natural hills a short walk away from Tikal’s center was actually a neighborhood of ruined buildings that had been designed to look like those in Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas.

Houston said their lidar analysis, coupled with a subsequent excavation by a team of Guatemalan archaeologists led by Edwin Román Ramírez, has prompted new insights on, and big questions about, Teotihuacan’s influence on the Maya civilization. 

“What we had taken to be natural hills actually were shown to be modified and conformed to the shape of the citadel — the area that was possibly the imperial palace — at Teotihuacan,” Houston said. “Regardless of who built this smaller-scale replica and why, it shows without a doubt that there was a different level of interaction between Tikal and Teotihuacan than previously believed.”

The results, including lidar images and a summary of excavation findings, were published on Tuesday, Sept. 28 in Antiquity.

Tikal and Teotihuacan were radically different cities, Houston said. Tikal, a Maya city, was fairly populous but relatively small in scale — “you could have walked from one end of the kingdom to the other in a day, maybe two” — while Teotihuacan had all the marks of an empire. Though little is known about the people who founded and governed Teotihuacan, it’s clear that, like the Romans, their influence extended far beyond their metropolitan center: Evidence shows they shaped and colonized countless communities hundreds of miles away.

Houston said anthropologists have known for decades that inhabitants of the two cities were in contact and often traded with one another for centuries before Teotihuacan conquered Tikal around the year 378 A.D. There’s also ample evidence suggesting that between the second and sixth centuries A.D., Maya elites and scribes lived in Teotihuacan, some bringing elements of the empire’s culture and materials — including its unique funerary rituals, slope-and-panel architectural style and green obsidian — back home to Tikal. Another Maya expert, David Stuart of U.T. Austin, has translated inscriptions that described the era when Teotihuacan generals, including one named Born from Fire, traveled to Tikal and unseated the local Maya king. 

But the research consortium’s latest lidar findings and excavations prove that the imperial power in modern-day Mexico did more than just trade with and culturally influence the smaller city of Tikal before conquering it. 

“The architectural complex we found very much appears to have been built for people from Teotihuacan or those under their control,” Houston said. “Perhaps it was something like an embassy complex, but when we combine previous research with our latest findings, it suggests something more heavy-handed, like occupation or surveillance. At the very least, it shows an attempt to implant part of a foreign city plan on Tikal.”

Houston said that excavations following the lidar work, led by Román Ramírez, confirmed that some buildings were constructed with mud plaster rather than the traditional Maya limestone. The structures were designed to be smaller replicas of the buildings that make up Teotihuacan’s citadel, down to the intricate cornices and terraces and the specific 15.5-degree east-of-north orientation of the complex’s platforms.

“It almost suggests that local builders were told to use an entirely non-local building technology while constructing this sprawling new building complex,” Houston said. “We’ve rarely seen evidence of anything but two-way interaction between the two civilizations, but here, we seem to be looking at foreigners who are moving aggressively into the area.”

At an adjacent, newly uncovered complex of residential buildings, archaeologists found projectile points crafted with flint, a material commonly used by the Maya, and green obsidian, a material used by residents of Teotihuacan — providing seeming evidence of conflict.

And near the replica citadel, archaeologists also recovered the remains of a body surrounded by carefully placed vessels, ceramic fragments, animal bones and projectile points. The site was dotted with charcoal, suggesting it had been set ablaze. Houston said the scene bears little resemblance to other burials or sacrifices at Tikal but is strikingly similar to the remains of warriors found years ago in Teotihuacan’s center.

“Excavations in the middle of the citadel at Teotihuacan have found the burials of many individuals dressed as warriors, and they appear to have been sacrificed and placed in mass graves,” Houston said. “We have possibly found a vestige of one of those burials at Tikal itself.”

Houston and his international colleagues still have much more to uncover and analyze. Andrew Scherer, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown and a bone specialist, will study the human remains to determine their origins, potentially revealing more about Teotihuacan’s relationship with Tikal. This summer, as COVID-19-related travel restrictions began to ease, Houston joined Garrison, Román Ramírez and Morgan Clark, a Brown graduate student in anthropology, in Guatemala to uncover buildings, fortifications and storage tanks in related fortresses nearby. Excavations will resume this fall at Tikal, under the leadership of Román Ramírez.

The more they find out, Houston said, the more he hopes they understand about Teotihuacan’s presence in Tikal — and, more broadly, how its imperial power changed the diverse cultural and political landscape in Mesoamerica.

“At this time, people are quite interested in the process of colonization and its aftermath, and in how our views of the world are informed or distorted by the expansion of economic and political systems around the globe,” Houston said. “Before European colonization of the Americas, there were empires and kingdoms of disproportionate influence and strength interacting with smaller civilizations in a way that left a large impact. Exploring Teotihuacan’s influence on Mesoamerica could be a way to explore the beginnings of colonialism and its oppressions and local collusions.”