Marion Forest – Recent Research on the Decline of Mesoamerican Teotihuacan: reconfiguring a city from the margins

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This webinar will present recent research results from the Hacienda Project in Teotihuacan, conducted in collaboration with Andrew Somerville of Iowa State University. We have been conducting a four-year project at the World Heritage site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, to gain a better understanding of the factors that led to Teotihuacan’s decline around A.D. 550–600.

We, along with our international team of several students and local archaeologists, have been studying changes in settlement patterns, diet, health, and technology, using systematic radiocarbon dating to refine Teotihuacan’s chronology further and examine the long-term processes of urbanization and de-urbanization. Our first season, in the summer of 2021, consisted of geophysics and drone surveying, followed by surface collection and testing, and larger excavations in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The project is funded by the French Embassy in Mexico and the National Science Foundation.  

Dr. Marion Forest received her PhD in archaeology from the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. Since 2008, she has specialized in ancient urbanism and urbanization processes in western and central Mexico. She has participated in multiple projects focusing on spatial organization, mapping, and remote sensing in the Zacapu and Patzcuaro Basins of West Mexico, as well as in Teotihuacan and Northern Mexico, and the Southwest of the United States. She also served as a Fyssen Foundation Fellow (2016-2018) at Arizona State University. In that capacity, she collaborated with Dr. Michael Smith to refine our understanding of the residential patterns and demographics at Teotihuacan. She is currently a senior archaeologist at Chronicle Heritage and the co-director of the Hacienda Metepec Project in Teotihuacan.