Music Banter - The Archaeology Thread

Saw this on the Smithsonian blog earlier this week:

A Secret Tunnel Found in Mexico May Finally Solve the Mysteries of Teotihuacán

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In the fall of 2003, a heavy rainstorm swept through the ruins of Teotihuacán, the pyramid-studded, pre-Aztec metropolis 30 miles northeast of present-day Mexico City. Dig sites sloshed over with water; a torrent of mud and debris coursed past rows of souvenir stands at the main entrance. The grounds of the city’s central courtyard buckled and broke. One morning, Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, arrived at work to find a nearly three-foot-wide sinkhole had opened at the foot of a large pyramid known as the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, in Teotihuacán’s southeast quadrant.

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.. The tunnel under the Temple of the Sun had been largely emptied by looters before archaeologists could get to it in the 1990s. But Gómez’s tunnel had been sealed off for some 1,800 years: Its treasures would be pristine.

In 2009, the government granted Gómez permission to dig, and he broke ground at the entrance of the tunnel, where he installed a staircase and ladders that would allow easy access to the subterranean site. He moved at a painstaking pace: inches at a time, a few feet every month. Excavating was done manually, with spades. Nearly 1,000 tons of earth were removed from the tunnel; after each new segment was cleared, Gómez brought in a 3-D scanner to document his progress.

The haul was tremendous. There were seashells, cat bones, pottery. There were fragments of human skin. There were elaborate necklaces. There were rings and wood and figurines. Everything was deposited deliberately and pointedly, as if in offering.