Glossary
Artifact: Portable manmade objects, made at a specific time and space. Examples include carved bone or shell, obsidian blades, and ceramic sherds.
Construction cells: Architectural features used as boxes to be filled in order to even a floor level or create the mass of a platform.
Chalchihuites: Iconographic element in the form of two concentric circles symbolizing preciousness.
Ecofacts: Organic or inorganic material found in their natural (unmodified) state, such as seeds, bones, and minerals.
Stucco: Fine plaster used for coating wall surfaces, the floor, or even molded into architectural decorations.
Stratigraphy: Study of the order and position of the layers of archaeological deposits to establish the sequence among them.
Sherds: Fragments of ceramic vessels.
Talud: Architectural style that consists of an inward-sloping surface (also known in English by the French term talus). It was a commonly used architectural form at Teotihuacan.
Tepetate: Aztec word (literally “sleeping mat of stone”) that refers to the volcanic tuff layer that constitutes the bedrock in Teotihuacan and elsewhere in central Mexico.