The stepped pyramid-temple was not an Aztec invention. Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, built many centuries before the Mexica arrived in the Valley of Mexico, and the temple platforms of Tula, the Toltec capital the Aztec themselves looked back on as a golden-age predecessor civilization, established the basic form long before Tenochtitlan existed. The Mexica adapted and monumentalized this inherited architectural tradition at their own capital and across the provincial centers their empire controlled, building the Templo Mayor as their own capital's largest and most elaborated example of a form used, with regional variation, across most of ancient Mesoamerica.
Spanish colonial authorities and missionary friars, arriving after the conquest, frequently demolished standing teocalli or stripped their stone facing for reuse, and deliberately built Catholic churches directly atop or beside the foundations of major pre-conquest temples as a calculated statement of religious replacement, a pattern documented at numerous sites across central Mexico. This practice means much of what is known today about specific teocalli construction and appearance depends heavily on colonial-era written and pictorial descriptions alongside the archaeological remains that escaped complete demolition.