{"id":18223,"date":"2025-08-11T08:16:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T12:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/?p=18223"},"modified":"2025-08-15T13:55:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T17:55:27","slug":"holding-history-in-his-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/2025\/08\/11\/holding-history-in-his-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"Holding History in His Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"

David Carballo \u201995 (right) in Teotihuacan, Mexico<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

David Carballo \u201995 was excavating in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in 2013 when he and a colleague found an elaborately painted ceramic pot with patchwork over its cracks. \u201cI liked the story it told,\u201d says Carballo,
an archaeologist who studies the lives of working-class people in pre-Hispanic civilizations of central Mexico. \u201cThese are people who had access to some nicer things, but they had to take care of it like it was an heirloom in the family, and we were getting some of that textured history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holding an object that someone else hasn\u2019t held in 15 centuries is part of the thrill for the archaeologist \u2014 but, he says, \u201cit\u2019s not just what you find; it\u2019s what you find out<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A professor at Boston University, Carballo has written several books and is currently writing a new book about Teotihuacan while on sabbatical. He\u2019s been studying the city since 1999, most recently focusing on the Tlanjinga district, where the demographics skewed toward working-class people and immigrants. \u201cThere has been a bias for centuries,\u201d he says of his field. \u201c[It\u2019s] mostly looked at the monuments to elite members of society and less of the daily life of most people.\u201d Understanding how this urban society functioned \u2014 from government to infrastructure to finding unity among a diverse population \u2014 can provide answers for our modern society. \u201cTrying to understand an ancient city like Teotihuacan only through its pyramids and palaces would be like trying to understand urban life in Washington, D.C., today when you only knew of the White House and a few of the monuments along the Mall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"

Carballo and a colleague found this patched-up painted ceramic pot while excavating in Teotihuacan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Carballo travels to Mexico at least once a year for excavations and lab work, but his very first visit to an archaeology site in the country \u2014 the one that put him on this career path \u2014 was as a Colgate senior with Professor Tony Aveni. \u201cThat was a life-changing experience,\u201d says Carballo, who remembers the group traveling around in two minivans, meeting \u201cpeople who I now realize to be luminaries in the field,\u201d and sleeping on the site at Teotihuacan. \u201cIt was really special to be there when it was [closed to tourists and] quieter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The adventure made \u201cme realize that this is actually a profession, not just [something in] Indiana Jones<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carballo has stayed in touch with Aveni as they\u2019ve co-authored several articles and both recently appeared in the same documentary in the making. Carballo and his wife even named their son Tony \u2014 for a number of reasons, but one of them being the positive association with the name of his mentor. When Carballo started touring colleges with his now high school\u2013age son, \u201cI got to introduce Tony to Tony, which was a lot of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now as a tenured professor himself, Carballo balances teaching with research trips. He has colleagues and graduate students who run his lab in Mexico when he\u2019s not there. \u201cWe have a storage issue in the discipline because in any summer, [there could be approximately] 100 boxes of artifacts we might uncover. Someone needs to be working almost year-round cataloging and classifying everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like any good historian, Carballo hopes that putting together these little pieces of the past will help us have a better perspective on the future. \u201cTeotihuacan has some interesting lessons for us,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was extremely multiethnic, it was a city that saw migration for 700 years and held together, almost all of its inhabitants lived in multifamily apartments, and it had probably five different languages spoken in it. It was a powerful and prestigious city for that time…. That\u2019s something that, as a nation celebrating 250 years, I think we could appreciate and learn from.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
David Carballo \u201995 and Yiduo He \u201924 are collaborating on a project and they’re pictured here, in front of the Sun Pyramid this summer. They are doing geophysical mapping of the Great Compound, hypothesized to either be Teotihuacan’s central marketplace or an administrative center.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archeologist David Carballo \u201995 studies the lives of working-class people in pre-Hispanic civilizations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":18227,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[354,1419,684,1156,165],"coauthors":[388],"class_list":["post-18223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alumni-spotlights","category-alumni-updates","tag-alumni","tag-archaeology","tag-author","tag-higher-education","tag-history"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-4JV","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2025\/08\/Carballo_Teotihuacan-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18223"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18332,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18223\/revisions\/18332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18223"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}