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Special Section: Taking Stock of Basin of Mexico Archaeology in The Early Twenty-First Century
In the 1960s and early 1970s, René Millon conceived and directed the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP), an intensive full-coverage surface survey, including small problem-oriented excavations, at the immense ancient city of Teotihuacan, in the highlands of central Mexico, as described in another paper in this issue of Ancient Mesoamerica (Millon and Altschul 2015). Also in this issue, Ian Robertson (2015) reports some major findings derived from TMP data. For a recent overall review of Teotihuacan and research on the site, see Cowgill (2007, 2015).
One product of the TMP was an archaeological map in which the city was divided into 500 × 500 m sectors, numbered north-south and east-west from a starting point near the city's center (Figure 1). Sector N3W4 is, for example, the sector that is the third northward and the fourth westward. Structures within a sector are designated by numbers and letters preceding the sector identification; for example, 16:S3E2. This information is essential background for the present paper, and for all other research on Teotihuacan. Figure 1.
Urban Teotihuacan, showing the map created by the TMP and locations mentioned in text. Locational data digitized by Ian Robertson.
In the following pages, I discuss issues of accuracy and validity of TMP data, followed by an examination of challenges associated with the creation of electronic files for these data. I then turn to some broader topics and priorities for further research on Teotihuacan, in some cases taking advantage of the TMP datasets already constructed.
THE TEOTIHUACAN MAPPING PROJECT: ACCURACY AND VALIDITY
By accuracy I mean being correct about what was actually on the ground surface at the time the TMP field work was carried out. By validity I mean drawing correct conclusions about ancient Teotihuacan. There are two major means of assessing accuracy and validity. One is through returning, on the ground, to TMP collection units and making new collections, often subdividing the units into smaller tracts and collecting intensively from each. The collection units defined by the TMP varied in size; the average was around one third of a hectare. Workers walked slowly, two or three meters apart, over all parts of a...