In pictographic old Egyptian, loanwords are easy to suss. Not having any indigenous roots, such words are spelt phonetically and never otherwise. Magnus Pharao Hansen has been applying the same principle to classic Choltal inscriptions.
They have a loanglyph too: the Striking Owl. This iconography is Teotihuacano. I think everyone agrees that the Place Of Reeds knocked a lot of head down in the Petén. The empire even installed a prince to rule over Mutul ("Tikal"). But we're talking about intrusive words that haven't a contemporary Maya-family etymology.
This'll be a placeholder. (I am not a mayanist.)
Dr Hansen has been arguing that the loans are in some paraNahua dialect and that, therefore, the Place Of Reeds was, if not called anything like "Teo Huacan" at the time, also paraNahua. Mind: this depends on his ability to reconstruct what that dialect would have sounded like, a thousand years before Catholics came with a Latin alphabet. We can do it for Choltal, precisely because sometimes an author could get phonetic. But not many outsiders were using so good a system, then, for writing.
That central Vale was shared between Nahua and Otomí as of AD ~1500. It may be some sharing had happened already. One does wonder how the Purempecha interposed themselves into Michoacan in the meantime.
Anyway if you want to give Dr Hansen a hearing, try "What Happened When?: Relative Chronology and the state of pre-Nahuan in the Classic Period. Paper presented at the Relative Chronology workshop at the University of Copenhagen, June 30th, 2023".
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