Three red glyphs in a Mexican cave may be Teotihuacan writing

Fire-blackened rock hangs above a bedrock shelf in Cave 19, a shallow cliff shelter on the western slope of Cerro Delgado at Chalcatzingo, in Mexico’s Morelos state. Three red painted glyphs on the walls around it are the subject of an argument from Christophe Helmke of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues, published in Antiquity: that the paintings may be Teotihuacan writing, left by people from that distant city.

The claim is a proposal that rests on how the signs resemble ones known from Teotihuacan itself, and the wording of the coverage keeps it conditional.

The three glyphs of Cave 19

According to Archaeology magazine’s report on the paper, the team mapped the shelter and used digital photo enhancement to bring out faint pigment; Naked Science names the technique as DStretch, an image-processing method that exaggerates colour differences so that red paint almost invisible to the eye shows up against the rock. The first glyph shows a stylized mountain flanked by speech scrolls, which the authors read as a possible reference to a “Singing Mountain,” a sign that also appears at Teotihuacan. The second shows items worn by Teotihuacan warriors: a beaded necklace, a cloak and a pointed dart.

The third is a rectangular frame bearing five-pointed stars, placed over the bedrock shelf beneath the fire-blackened wall. Another account, in Naked Science, describes it as the largest of the three, about 1.02 by 0.60 metres, and the mountain glyph as only partly preserved. That outlet gives the dart as feathered and says the researchers took the warrior sign to denote a title or military group, not merely a weapon.

A Formative-period site and a distant city

Chalcatzingo is better known for something else. Wikipedia’s entry on the site describes a Formative-period centre with 31 known bas-relief monuments in Olmec style, peaking between 700 and 500 BCE and continuing afterward as a minor ceremonial centre in the Classic period. The same entry says the settlement sat on trade routes linking Guerrero, the Valley of Mexico, Oaxaca and the Gulf lowlands, which places the cave on a corridor that already connected the Valley of Mexico, where Teotihuacan stood, with the regions to the south and east.

The team’s reading of the cave goes beyond the signs. The scorched wall and the shelf beneath the star frame suggest burning of incense or of funerary bundles, according to the Archaeology magazine report, and Naked Science adds that the researchers connect the frame with rituals honouring dead warriors. In Helmke’s reading, the paintings were likely made by Teotihuacan settlers, an inference drawn from the signs rather than a recovered record of who painted them.

Teotihuacan writing under debate

The significance lies in a long-running dispute. Teotihuacan, which thrived from about 100 BC to 550 AD, has often been described as a city that used only isolated or emblematic symbols. Helmke concludes that “Teotihuacan writing can therefore no longer be dismissed or considered as a set of isolated or emblematic symbols.”

The position has history behind it. A 2020 Associated Press report, carried by the Oman Observer, said more than 300 Teotihuacan hieroglyphs had been tentatively identified, including a patio floor with 42 glyphs described as the longest text found at the city. Helmke, a writing-system specialist at the University of Copenhagen, was among the scholars quoted, alongside David Stuart of the University of Texas and Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan.

Art historian Tatiana Valdez told the same report that Teotihuacan used hieroglyphics and used them well, given how many examples have turned up. The report still described the debate as continuing, and the Cave 19 argument tries to narrow it by pointing to a place name, a warrior title and a ritual setting within one small group of signs, with the mountain sign and the warrior regalia both tied by the authors to Teotihuacan’s own imagery, while the star frame is read mainly through the burned shelf beneath it.

The patio lies in the La Ventilla district and dates to roughly 300 to 450 CE. Jesper Nielsen and Helmke argue in Ancient Mesoamerica that most of its 42 signs relate to disease-causing beings and curing rituals, a reading that treats the glyphs as meaningful sequences rather than decoration.

Three painted signs on a cave wall cannot settle the debate alone, and the verb in the claim stays conditional: they may be Teotihuacan writing. What the Cave 19 glyphs add is a place, a rock shelter in Morelos far from the city itself, where signs of that tradition may have been used for ritual.

The Antiquity paper’s own dating of the paintings was not available in the coverage reviewed, so the age of the glyphs remains an open point.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.