Cities of plazas and stepped platform pyramids carrying temples, from the Olmec to the Aztec: the talud-tablero terraces of Teotihuacan, the steep temple-pyramids, corbel vaults and roof combs of the Maya, and cities laid out to the sky.
Mesoamerican architecture developed without metal tools, draught animals or the wheel in construction, and, like early Egypt, without the true arch. What it had in abundance was labour, stone, lime for mortar and plaster, and a shared religious world in which the city was a model of the cosmos. Its basic unit is the plaza bounded by platforms: raised terraces carrying temples, palaces and ball courts, grouped round open spaces for gathering and ritual.
The Olmec of the Gulf Coast built the first large earthen platforms, at San Lorenzo and La Venta, before 1000 BC. In the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacan (flourishing c. AD 100–550) became one of the largest cities of its day, laid out on a grid skewed about 15½° east of north along the Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at its head. Its builders gave their platforms the talud-tablero profile: a sloping talud below, a framed vertical tablero projecting above, repeated stage by stage, plastered and painted. The Temple of the Feathered Serpent carried serpent heads carved in the round on its tableros.
The Maya cities of the southern lowlands and Yucatán (Tikal, Calakmul, Copán, Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá) reached their height in the Classic period (c. 250–900). Their temple-pyramids are steep, with terraces of sloping walls and projecting apron mouldings, a single stair, and on top a small temple of a few narrow rooms roofed with corbel vaults, crowned by a tall roof comb. Maya builders used a strong lime concrete core faced with cut stone veneer; the Puuc cities of Yucatán, such as Uxmal, covered their upper façades with mosaics of carved stone. Stelae in the plazas recorded the reigns of kings in the Long Count calendar.
The corbel vault shaped every Maya interior. Because it stands only while each half has its centre of gravity over its wall, rooms stayed narrow (rarely more than three metres) and long, with walls far thicker than the spaces they enclose. The architecture is therefore one of exterior masses and platforms rather than of interior space; its drama is in the stair, the silhouette and the plaza.
In the Postclassic, Toltec and then Aztec builders spread colonnaded halls and twin-temple pyramids across central Mexico. The Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, rebuilt seven times over earlier shells, carried shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc until the Spanish conquest of 1521.