A teocalli was typically built as a core of packed earth and rubble faced with cut stone or lime stucco, rising in a series of receding terraces toward a flat summit that carried the actual shrine building, itself usually a modest structure compared to the great mass of the platform beneath it. One or more steep stairways, sometimes flanked by monumental stone serpent heads or other carved elements, ran up the platform's face, and the ascent itself carried ritual weight, a physical and symbolic climb separating the ordinary ground level from the sacred precinct at the summit where priests performed the temple's core rites.
Archaeologists and art historians reading this form generally connect it to a widespread Mesoamerican understanding of the artificial temple mound as a constructed sacred mountain, echoing the religious significance of real mountains as places where earth, rain and the underworld met, so that raising a teocalli was in a real sense manufacturing a mountain where the local landscape did not provide one naturally, most acutely relevant at Tenochtitlan, built on a lake island with no natural peak of its own.