The name “Street of the Dead” used
to designate Teotihuacan's main avenue originates
from a Nahuatl notation on a sixteenth-century map. Though
this “story” is often deemed apocryphal, I
argue in this paper that oral tradition preserved conceptual
information that may not be archaeologically recoverable.
Support for this position comes from comparative cultural
analysis of Mesoamerican mortuary bundles as they are expressed
in ritual and iconography. Crucial to this argument are
the well-known stone masks of Teotihuacan. A case is made
that the masks originally served as the faces of oracular
mortuary bundles. The likely existence of mortuary bundles
at Teotihuacan generates organizational models for the
city in which lineage emerges as a fundamental element
and suggests new insight into status differentiation and
the iconography of power at Teotihuacan.