When diplomacy fails: After gifts, Teotihuacan turned on Maya cities

So when University of California, Riverside, archaeologist Nawa Sugiyama and her colleagues found the 1,700-year-old skeleton of one buried alongside other offerings in a pyramid in the city’s ceremonial center, they knew it must have come from far afield—such as somewhere in the territory of what was then a neighboring political power, the Maya.

No primates (other than humans) live in the region around what’s now Mexico City, and a spider monkey would have been “an exotic curiosity, alien to the high elevations of Teotihuacan,” as Sugiyama and her colleagues describe it in their paper.

Sugiyama and her colleagues say the ill-fated monkey was probably part of a gift to the Teotihuacan’s rulers from a neighboring Maya kingdom.

Sugiyama and her colleagues suggest it was likely on public display—allowing Teotihuacan’s rulers to show off how their prestige and power had brought the city such a rare gift.

It was, more or less, the ancient version of China’s gift of two pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the US in 1972, say Sugiyama and her colleagues.

“As millions of tourists celebrated the life of Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing at the National Zoo, the gift of the spider monkey who likely resided, and thus was observed by the public, at the Plaza of the Columns complex held important sociopolitical implications,” they wrote.