Symbols on his shield and the Groucho Marx–style goggle-eyed headdress connected him to the ancient city of Teotihuacan, located north of Mexico City, which in his day was the largest city in the New World. (Today it is a magnificent ruin containing some of the greatest pyramids in the Americas.) An analysis of isotopes in his bones, however, showed he had grown up not in Teotihuacan, but probably in the Maya city of Tikal, in northern Guatemala, two hundred miles north of Copán. (Drinking water, which varies from place to place, leaves a unique chemical signature in the bones.)
