Teotihuacan was founded in the last centuries BCE but reached its scale between 100 and 550 CE. The city's spine is the so-called 'Avenue of the Dead', a roughly 4 km ceremonial axis running north–south. At its northern end stands the Pyramid of the Moon; the 65-metre Pyramid of the Sun rises midway; to the south stands the Temple of the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcoatl). The pyramids were once painted in vivid red, yellow, and blue pigment.

The city is laid out on a grid — nothing else in the ancient Americas matches it for systematic planning. Residential quarters are organised as courtyard apartment blocks; many house walls bear murals of gods, jaguars, water, and maize scenes. The geometric precision and chromatic intensity of these paintings became the foundation reference for later Mesoamerican pictorial art.

We do not know what language the city's builders spoke or what they called it. The name 'Teotihuacan' was given a thousand years later by the Aztecs, who came upon the ruined city and called it 'the place where the gods were born'. The city collapsed abruptly in the 6th century, probably through internal conflict marked by fires set in its public centre. What remains is the visual archive that shaped Mesoamerican art's vocabulary of scale, geometry, and urban space.