Cuicuilco is an important archaeological site located on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco in the southeastern Valley of Mexico, in what is today the borough of Tlalpan in Mexico City.
Construction of the Cuicuilco pyramid began a few centuries BCE, during the Late Preclassic period of Mesoamerican history. The site was occupied until its destruction by the eruption of Xitle, sometime between 245 and 315 CE.
Xitle (Nahuatl pronunciation: [ʃitɬe] Nahuatl, "navel") is a monogenetic volcano in the Ajusco range in Cumbres del Ajusco National Park. It is located in the Tlalpan borough in the southwestern part of Mexico City. It is an ash cone volcano with a conical form, round base, altitude of approximately 300m, and a slope between 30° and 40°.
Xitle erupted during the period AD 245-315, according to the results of radiocarbon dating. Among the consequences of this eruption were the formation of the Pedregal de San Ángel lava fields, to the south of the Mexican Federal District. Cuicuilco, one of the most refined cities of Mesoamerica, was destroyed and covered by lava. The subsequent diaspora of the Cuicuilcans, and the attendant diffusion of their culture across most of central Mexico, influenced important cultural changes in the nearby power center of Teotihuacan.
The Mesoamerican Preclassic period began in about 2500 B. C. It dates from the probable date of the first Mesoamerican ceramics and lasted until around 200 A. D, the date of the fall of Cuicuilco, located south of Mexico City, where the circular pyramid built by this culture remains. Attributing its disappearance to the eruption of the volcano Xitle, located a few kilometers south of the pyramid. The eruption covered a radius of approximately 20 kilometers, in some cases up to 30 meters thick.
It indicates the moment in which the Maya civilization found their own distinctive culture which differentiated them from other Mesoamerican groups. These societies were sedentary agricultural villages, in which ceramics first occurred. On the Pacific coast, this period started around the year 1800 B. C., but in the rest of the Maya area it started between 1000 and 1200 B. C.