At the height of its power, the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan near present-day Mexico City was home to over 125,000 inhabitants. The city’s initial settlement began about 25 miles northeast of Mexico City around 100 BCE. Barely 350 years later, Teotihuacan featured multiple massive pyramids, religious temples, and multifamily residential structures along its streets. As painstaking as it is, the team believes it’s the only way to properly decipher the written language. “No one before us has used a language that fits the time period to decipher this written language,” Hansen continued.