High on a volcanic hill in central Mexico, inside a shallow cave now reachable only by rappelling down a steep escarpment, three faded red paintings have survived for roughly 1,500 years.
One appears to name the mountain itself. Another invokes warriors’ weapons and regalia. The third surrounds a fire-blackened stone shelf with a frame of stars.
Taken together, archaeologists believe the glyphs preserve evidence that people connected to the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan traveled to Chalcatzingo between the fourth and sixth centuries AD to conduct rituals at a sacred place known as the “Singing Mountain,” possibly including ceremonies honoring or even cremating dead warriors.
The findings, published in Antiquity, also add to mounting evidence that Teotihuacan possessed a genuine writing system and reveal how far its written language, religious practices, and people traveled beyond the enormous city.
“Teotihuacan writing can therefore no longer be dismissed or considered as a set of isolated or emblematic symbols,” researchers write. “It was a genuine script, embedded in the sociopolitical and religious life of the city.”
Chalcatzingo lies roughly 55 miles southeast of Mexico City and is considerably older than the paintings. The site is famous for monumental Olmec-style rock carvings dating between approximately 900 and 500 BC. More than 50 carved panels have been cataloged across a landscape dominated by two volcanic hills, Cerro Chalcatzingo and Cerro Delgado.
For the people who lived there, those mountains apparently meant much more than geography.
Caves, mountains, rain, and the emergence of crops were strongly intertwined in Mesoamerican ritual traditions. Chalcatzingo’s earlier carvings include caves emitting rain clouds, young plants, and imagery connected with the emergence of maize.
Hundreds of years later, someone returned to that sacred landscape carrying a very different artistic tradition.
A Message Painted Above Fire
Cave 19 sits roughly 1,080 feet from Chalcatzingo’s archaeological center, partway up the western side of Cerro Delgado. Today, researchers must climb the mountain from the opposite side and rappel down to reach it. The team suspects ancient visitors may instead have climbed upward using scaffold-like ladders; carved footholds and rough steps remain in portions of the terrain.
Calling it a cave almost exaggerates its size. The rock shelter covers only about 80 square feet and extends little more than seven feet into the mountain.
A low stone shelf sits at its rear. The wall and ceiling immediately above it are blackened by fire.
Around that spot are three glyphs painted with dark-red pigment, probably derived from hematite. Although researchers had documented the paintings before, renewed fieldwork in 2022 let them photograph them digitally and use color-channel processing and DStretch enhancement to recover details difficult to distinguish with the naked eye.
The first glyph provided the study’s most intriguing connection.
Although part has weathered away, researchers identified a stylized mountain accompanied by scrolls emerging from an open mouth. In Teotihuacan writing, those scrolls can represent speech or song.
They propose that the glyphs translate to “Singing Mountain.”
A nearby hill was historically known by the Nahuatl name Cuicatepec, which likewise means “Singing Mountain.” The researchers argue the painted glyph could therefore label Cerro Delgado itself, potentially preserving the mountain’s name for more than a millennium.
But another clue lies nearly 60 miles away.
Teotihuacan Left Its Own Map
Murals at Teotihuacan depict people carrying incense pouches and carrying out rituals, accompanied by glyphs identifying participants, actions, and places.
Among them is the same apparent destination: “Singing Mountain.”
If the identification of Cerro Delgado is correct, two sets of evidence suddenly intersect. One names Singing Mountain at Teotihuacan. Another seemingly labels the mountain at Chalcatzingo itself.
That led the researchers to the compelling possibility that Chalcatzingo served as a pilgrimage destination for people traveling from Teotihuacan to perform ceremonies there.
The other Cave 19 paintings may reveal what some of those ceremonies involved.
Glyph 2 combines a beaded necklace, cloth, and an upright dart launched from an atlatl, or spear-thrower. The researchers interpret the combination as a martial title, possibly identifying a particular warrior order.
Glyph 3 is different. Rather than writing, it forms a large rectangular frame decorated with five-pointed stars directly around the fire-blackened shelf.
Similar star-covered frames appear in Teotihuacan art as ceremonial awnings associated with rituals commemorating dead warriors.
That makes the soot beneath it particularly interesting.
Researchers say incense may simply have been burned on the shelf. But another, more dramatic possibility is that it served as a platform for a funerary bundle during cremation.
No surviving material can establish which occurred, and the researchers carefully present cremation as a hypothesis rather than a discovery. Still, the combination of fire, martial imagery, and a ceremonial frame associated elsewhere with dead warriors makes the relationship difficult to dismiss as accidental.
Teotihuacan: A Civilization That Wrote
The paintings add to a larger rethinking of Teotihuacan itself.
For decades, researchers debated whether the metropolis possessed true writing or just a collection of symbolic signs. Recent research increasingly points toward a logo-phonetic script comparable in fundamental ways to other Mesoamerican writing systems. Researchers have now identified nearly 120 signs, including representations of places, people, titles, calendar information, and actions.
Cave 19 expands that artistic work beyond the metropolis, placing those symbols in an unusually physical context.
Here, writing wasn’t carved onto a monument standing in a city plaza. Someone carried pigment up a sacred mountain, entered a tiny shelter, and painted the mountain’s apparent name beside the symbol of warriors and a place where fire burned.
Chalcatzingo had already been sacred for centuries by then.
The new interpretation indicates Teotihuacan’s visitors did not simply occupy another piece of territory. They may have recognized the significance of a much older sacred landscape and folded it into their own religious world, traveling to a mountain whose ancient name, remarkably, may still be written on its wall.
“The glyphs therefore underscore the importance of the cave and its role in the commemoration of deceased warriors, perhaps even encompassing a cremation ritual, where writing, ritual and landscape converged in the religious practices of Teotihuacan,” researchers write. “Beyond their immediate context, the glyphs from Cave 19 add to the growing corpus of Teotihuacan logograms and signs, broadening our understanding of this ancient Mesoamerican writing system and its temporal and geographic spread.”
The study, “Painted Teotihuacan glyphs of Cave 19, Chalcatzingo, Morelos, Mexico,” appeared in the journal Antiquity.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com