archaeologist michael spence. bury in cemeteries set apart from the places where the people lived. that makes it difficult to tie them ba into their living quarters. in teotihuacan, fortunately, the people were buried within the apartment compound. some of them were buried in open spaces like patios. these would have been particularly important individuals. but many of them were buried under the floors of the rooms that they had actually lived in. so in teotihuacan, we have the possibility of using these skeletons to try and detect relationships within the apartment compound. keach: thousands of boxes line the walls of a laboratory in mexico's national anthropologmuseum. this is where skeletal remains from excavations at teotihuacan and other sites are stored. looking for evidence of ancient kinship, spence came here to analyze 81 skeletons from a single residential compound known as la ventilla. spence: well, i analyzed them for a series of traits, about a dozen traits. these traits, we think, are partially genet

michael spence is directing the excavation. he has just found some pottery in one of the ruins. spence: it's painted here. you can see that there's red paint over most of the interior except up along the rim. there's a little bit up there, too. it's going to be very delicate, very fragile. and i'll try and reassemble it and see if there's any sort of a design on it, or if it's just a solid red. we've been picking up pottery from all over the fields. and in examining the pottery, we saw that a high proportion of it was foreign to the city. and we knew from the work of others that it came from the oaxacan area. it turns out that actually it was produced here. the people moved here, but they continued to make pottery in their home tradition. keach: the pottery indicates that this compound may have been occupied by traders from far-off monte alban, an indication of a complex economy here. bill sanders. one of the aspects of culture that is extraordinarily variable is the economy. economy means the ownership of property and the production and distribution of goods. there are cultures