Teotihuacan
"Its foundation dates to around 100 BC, and its decline to around AD 600." (329)
"[I]n the course of those centuries, Teotihuacan became a city of such grandeur and sophistication that it could easily be put on a par with Rome at the height of its imperial power."
"conservative estimates place its population at around 100,000"
notably, though, Teotihuacan had "found a way to govern itself without warlords" (330)
("as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan")
its tunnel architecture is comprised of "cthonic labyrinths and mineral-crusted shrines" (but notably not royal tombs)
it could plausibly be "a utopian experiment in urban life" (332) "many citizens enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own" (343)
scholars have identified that it "had gone some way down the road to authoritarian rule, but then around AD 300 suddenly reversed course: possibly there was a revolution of sorts, followed by a more equal distribution of the city's resources and the establishment of a kind of 'collective governance'" (332)
homes contain psychedelic art, "dizzying color contrasts, fractal arrangements of organic forms that merge into one another, [...] intense geometrical patterning, bordering on kaleidoscopic," [and] figures "grasping hallucinogenic seeds and mushrooms" (344)