Teotihuacan Trivia
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46 free Teotihuacan trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Teotihuacan trivia quiz covers the largest city of the pre-Columbian Americas, forty kilometres from Mexico City. The easy questions are the ones any visitor knows: what the Aztec name means, which two great pyramids dominate the site, what the main street is called, roughly when the city flourished and the fact that the Aztecs did not build it. From there it moves into the population estimates, the apartment compounds, the murals, the talud-tablero style, the green Pachuca obsidian that made the city rich, and the puzzling absence of kings, palaces and writing. The hard end covers what archaeologists have pieced together: the sacrificed warriors under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the 378 coup at Tikal and Spearthrower Owl, the burning of the elite core around 550 and the 535-536 climate crisis, Leopoldo Batres's flawed 1910 restoration, the tunnel found under the Pyramid of the Sun in 1971, and Sergio Gómez Chávez's rain-opened sinkhole that led to a sealed tunnel full of pyrite spheres and pools of liquid mercury. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city, its pyramids, temples, gods and excavators, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The ruins of Teotihuacan lie within 50 km of which modern metropolis?
Mexico City
Mexico City. Close as it is to the old Aztec heartland, Teotihuacan was no Aztec creation: it had stood empty for centuries before they first saw it.
Q 02The Aztec name Teotihuacan is usually glossed as what?
Birthplace of the gods
Birthplace of the gods. The Aztecs coined the name centuries after the city emptied; what its own people called it has never been recovered.
Q 03Who built Teotihuacan?
An unknown people
An unknown people. Even their language is lost; the Aztecs only found the ruins centuries later, and the Toltecs once credited with the city rose long after it fell.
Q 04Why did the Aztecs call Teotihuacan's main street the Avenue of the Dead?
They took its platforms for tombs
They took its platforms for tombs. The mounds lining the avenue were really the bases of temples and palaces, so the name records an Aztec mistake, not a cemetery.
Q 05What did Teotihuacan's planners do to the San Juan River where it crossed their city?
Rerouted it through stone canals
Rerouted it through stone canals. The river was bent to run with the streets and pass beneath the main avenue, a sign of how tightly the whole city was planned.
Q 06Teotihuacan's main avenue points straight at what?
A sacred mountain
A sacred mountain. The avenue, tilted about 15 degrees east of north, aims at the peak of Cerro Gordo, and the builders set the Pyramid of the Moon at its far end, in line with it.
Q 07What did archaeologists tunnelling into the Pyramid of the Moon find at its core?
Smaller, older versions of itself
Smaller, older versions of itself. Each enlargement swallowed the last, and buried within them were offerings that included sacrificed people and animals.
Q 08What happened at Teotihuacan after fire gutted its centre?
People went on living there
People went on living there. The flames took the temples and palaces along the main avenue, but families stayed on among the ruins for generations before drifting away.
Q 09The fire that ruined Teotihuacan struck mainly temples and elite compounds, which many scholars read as what?
A revolt from within
A revolt from within. No trace of foreign attackers has been found, while statues inside the palaces were deliberately smashed, as if the city's own people had turned on its rulers.
Q 10What disaster is thought to have driven refugees from Cuicuilco to swell early Teotihuacan?
A volcanic eruption
A volcanic eruption. It is thought to have wrecked the rival city, and those who fled north may have helped turn Teotihuacan from a small settlement into a metropolis.
Q 11What was Teotihuacan's most important industry and main source of wealth?
Obsidian working
Obsidian working. The city controlled the mines at nearby Pachuca and turned the volcanic glass into blades and dart points that were traded across Mesoamerica.
Q 12Which grisly item turned up among the offerings in the tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent?
Fragments of human skin
Fragments of human skin. They lay among some 75,000 objects, from jaguar bones and balls of amber to necklaces with the string intact, all set down deliberately as offerings.
Q 13The architectural style of a sloping wall topped by a rectangular panel, closely associated with Teotihuacan, is called what?
Talud-tablero
Q 21In 378 CE, a warlord tied to Teotihuacan replaced the king of which great Maya city?
Tikal
Tikal. It lay hundreds of miles away in the Maya lowlands, and the newcomer, whose Maya name means 'born of fire', installed a new ruling line there.
Q 22Which insect's wings were found packed in a box among the tunnel offerings at Teotihuacan?
Beetle
Beetle. Even wings this fragile lasted some 1,800 years underground, still lying in the box where they had been set down as an offering.
Q 23Which prized bean reached Teotihuacan along trade routes from groves near the Gulf of Mexico?
Cacao
Cacao. It was one of the luxuries that flowed in along Teotihuacan's trade routes, while the city's finely decorated pottery travelled out the other way.
Talud-tablero. Builders across Mesoamerica copied the look, and versions of it turn up on temples in Maya cities hundreds of miles to the south-east.
Q 14At their zenith, the main structures of Teotihuacan were painted in what colour?
Dark red
Dark red. Only scattered patches of the paint survive, so the bare stone gives little idea of the city its builders saw.
Q 15In what state were ten of the twelve people found buried in a vault in the Pyramid of the Moon?
Beheaded
Beheaded. Their hands had been bound behind their backs and the bodies thrown into the vault, while the two others in the same grave were laid out in rich ornaments.
Q 16What does Teotihuacan's most important deity seem to have been?
A goddess
A goddess. Scholars call her the Great Goddess and she appears in murals giving out water and maize, though some now doubt that the images all show a single deity.
Q 17The chief deity in Teotihuacan's murals wears a fanged mouth mask like the jaws of which creature?
A spider
A spider. Spiders also appear among the plants painted above the figure, which is why scholars have nicknamed the deity for them.
Q 18What did 1980s digs uncover beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent?
More than a hundred sacrificial victims
More than a hundred sacrificial victims. Many were young men buried in groups with their hands tied behind their backs, an offering made when the temple was built.
Q 19The Temple of the Feathered Serpent sits inside which walled enclosure at the southern end of the Avenue of the Dead?
The Ciudadela
The Ciudadela. The Spanish named it 'the citadel', mistaking the great enclosure for a fort; it was really a ceremonial plaza that could hold tens of thousands of people.
Q 20What did later builders do to the carved front of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent?
Hid it behind a new platform
Hid it behind a new platform. The addition went up in the fourth century, and some scholars read it as a snub to the rulers the temple had glorified.
Q 24The huge Great Compound on Teotihuacan's main avenue is thought to have been the city's what?
Central marketplace
Central marketplace. Cotton, salt and bright tropical feathers all passed through the city, and a market this size is one reason scholars call Teotihuacan a true state.
Q 25Which status did Teotihuacan gain in 1987?
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site. UNESCO's title has not kept development at bay: roads, shops, five towns and even a military base press in on the protected ruins.
Q 26The Pyramid of the Sun was hurriedly restored in 1905–10 in time for which national anniversary?
A century of independence
A century of independence. The rush showed: the man in charge stripped many facing stones and added a terrace the pyramid never had, work now judged flawed.
Q 27The tunnel found under the Pyramid of the Sun in 1971 ends in a chamber shaped like what?
A four-leaf clover
A four-leaf clover. Looters had emptied its four lobes in antiquity, so nobody can say whether the chamber under the pyramid's heart was a tomb or a shrine.
Q 28How was the tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent discovered in 2003?
A sinkhole opened after heavy rain
A sinkhole opened after heavy rain. Archaeologist Sergio Gómez had himself lowered into the hole on a rope and found he was standing in a man-made tunnel nobody knew existed.
Q 29The robot used to explore the tunnel beneath the Feathered Serpent temple was named after which rain god?
Tlaloc
Tlaloc. The little robot, Tláloc II, crawled where no person had been for about 1,800 years and sent back the first pictures of the chambers at the tunnel's end.
Q 30What do archaeologists think the glittering tunnel beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was built to represent?
The underworld
The underworld. Its builders pressed glittering pyrite into the rock so that the dark passage shone like a night sky, a realm of the dead beneath the world of the living.