A Secret Tunnel Found in Mexico
May Finally Solve the Mysteries of
Teotihuacán
The chance discovery beneath a nearly 2,000-year-
old pyramid leads to the heart of a lost civilization
The Temple of the Plumed Serpent is adorned with carved snake heads and slithering bodies. (Janet
Jarman)
By Matthew Shaer; Photographs by Janet Jarman
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 cityʼs central courtyard buckled and
broke. One morning, Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist with Mexicoʼs
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 Teotihuacánʼs southeast
quadrant.
“My first thought was, ‘What exactly am I looking at?ʼ” Gómez told me
recently. “The second was, ‘How exactly are we going to fix this?ʼ”
Gómez is wiry and small, with pronounced cheekbones, nicotine-stained
fingers and a helmet of dense black hair that adds a couple of inches to
his height. He has spent the past three decades—almost all of his
professional career—working in and around Teotihuacán, which once,
long ago, served as a cosmopolitan center of the Mesoamerican world.
He is fond of saying that there are few living humans who know the place
as intimately as he does.
And as far as he was concerned, there wasnʼt anything beneath the
Temple of the Plumed Serpent beyond dirt, fossils and rock. Gómez
fetched a flashlight from his truck and aimed it into the sinkhole. Nothing:
only darkness. So he tied a line of heavy rope around his waist and, with
several colleagues holding onto the other end, he descended into the
murk.
Gómez came to rest in the middle of what appeared to be a man-made
tunnel. “I could make out some of the ceiling,” he told me, “but the tunnel
itself was blocked in both directions by these immense stones.”
In designing Teotihuacán (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), the cityʼs
architects had arranged the major monuments on a north-south axis,
with the so-called “Avenue of the Dead” linking the largest structure, the
Temple of the Sun, with the Ciudadela, the southeasterly courtyard that
housed the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Gómez knew that
archaeologists had previously discovered a narrow tunnel underneath the
Temple of the Sun. He theorized that he was now looking at a kind of
mirror tunnel, leading to a subterranean chamber beneath the Temple of
the Plumed Serpent. If he was correct, it would be a find of stunning
proportions—the type of achievement that can make a career.
“The problem was,” he told me, “you canʼt just dive in and start tearing
up earth. You have to have a clear hypothesis, and you have to get
approval.”
Gómez set about making his plans. He erected a tent over the sinkhole,
to keep it away from the prying eyes of the hundreds of thousands of
tourists who visit Teotihuacán each year, and with the help of the
National Institute of Anthropology and History arranged for the delivery
of a lawnmower-size, high-resolution, ground-penetrating radar device.
Beginning in the early months of 2004, he and a handpicked team of
some 20 archaeologists and workers scanned the earth under the
Ciudadela, returning every afternoon to upload the results to Gómezʼs
computers. By 2005, the digital map was complete.
As Gómez had suspected, the tunnel ran approximately 330 feet from
the Ciudadela to the center of the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. The
hole that had appeared during the 2003 storms was not the actual
entrance; that lay a few yards back, and it had apparently been
intentionally sealed with large boulders nearly 2,000 years ago. Whatever
was inside that tunnel, Gómez thought to himself, was meant to stay
hidden forever.
Gómez believes the tunnel is “one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.” (Janet
Jarman)
Nearly 100,000 tons of earth have been removed from the tunnel, which Gómez hopes to finish
excavating this summer. (By 5W Infographics; Research by Tanya Sandler; Sources: Sergio Gómez, René
Million and David M. Carballo)
**********
Teotihuacán has long stood as the greatest of Mesoamerican mysteries:
the site of a colossal and influential culture about which frustratingly little
is understood, from the conditions of its rise to the circumstances of its
collapse to its actual name. Teotihuacán translates as “the place where
men become gods” in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, who likely
found the ruins of the deserted city sometime in the 1300s, centuries
after its abandonment, and concluded that a powerful ur-culture—an
ancestor of theirs—must have once resided in its vast temples.
The city lies in a basin at the southernmost edge of the Mexican Plateau,
an undulating landmass that forms the spine of modern-day Mexico.
Inside the basin the climate is mild, the land riven by streams and rivers—
ideal conditions for farming and raising livestock.
Teotihuacán itself was likely settled as early as 400 B.C., but it was only
around A.D. 100, an era of robust population growth and increased
urbanization in Mesoamerica, that the metropolis as we know it, with its
wide boulevards and monumental pyramids, was built. Some historians
have theorized that its founders were refugees driven north by the
eruption of a volcano. Others have speculated that they were Totonacs, a
tribe from the east.
Whatever the case, the Teotihuacanos, as they are now known, proved
themselves to be skilled urban planners. They built stone-sided canals to
reroute the San Juan River directly under the Avenue of the Dead, and
set about constructing the pyramids that would form the cityʼs core: the
Temple of the Plumed Serpent, the even larger 147-foot-tall Temple of
the Moon and the bulky, sky-obscuring 213-foot-tall Temple of the Sun.
Clemency Coggins, a professor emerita of archaeology and art history at
Boston University, has suggested that the city was designed as a
physical manifestation of its foundersʼ creation myth. “Not only was
Teotihuacán laid out in a measured rectangular grid, but the pattern was
oriented to the movement of the sun, which was born there,” Coggins
has written. She is far from the only historian to see the city as large-
scale metaphor. Michael Coe, an archaeologist at Yale, argued in the
1980s that individual structures might be representations of the
emergence of humankind out of a vast and tumultuous sea. (As is in
Genesis, Mesoamericans of the time are thought to have envisioned the
world as being born from complete darkness, in this case aqueous.)
Consider the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, Coe suggested—the same
temple that hid Sergio Gómezʼs tunnel. The structureʼs facade was
splashed with what Coggins called “marine motifs”: shells and what
appear to be waves. Coe wrote that the temple represents the “initial
creation of the universe from a watery void.”
Hot-air balloons float above Teotihuacán just after dawn. In the foreground is the Pyramid of the Moon,
with the Pyramid of the Sun in the distance. (Janet Jarman)
Recent evidence suggests that the religion practiced in these pyramids
bore a resemblance to the religion practiced in the contemporaneous
Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, hundreds of miles to the southeast:
the worshiping of the sun and moon and stars; the veneration of a
Quetzalcoatl-like plumed serpent; the frequent occurrence, in painting
and sculpture, of a jaguar that doubles as deity and protector of men.
Yet peaceful ritual was apparently not always enough to sustain the
Teotihuacanosʼ connection to their gods. In 2004, Saburo Sugiyama, an
anthropologist from the University of Japan and Arizona State University,
who has spent decades studying Teotihuacán, and Rubén Cabrera, of
Mexicoʼs National Institute of Anthropology and History, located a vault
under the Temple of the Moon that held the remains of an array of wild
animals, including jungle cats and eagles, along with 12 human corpses,
ten missing their heads. “It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of
clean symbolic performances,” Sugiyama said at the time. “It is most
likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with
sacrificed people and animals.”
Between A.D. 150 and 300, Teotihuacán grew rapidly. Locals harvested
beans, avocados, peppers and squash on fields raised in the middle of
shallow lakes and swampland—a technique known as chinampa—and
kept chickens and turkeys. Several heavily trafficked trade routes were
established, linking Teotihuacán to obsidian quarries in Pachuca and
cacao groves near the Gulf of Mexico. Cotton came in from the Pacific
Coast, ceramics from Veracruz.
By A.D. 400, Teotihuacán had become the most powerful and influential
city in the region. Residential neighborhoods sprang up in concentric
circles around the city center, eventually comprising thousands of
individual family dwellings, not dissimilar to single-story apartments, that
together may have housed 200,000 people.
Recent fieldwork by scholars like David Carballo, of Boston University,
has revealed the sheer diversity of the citizenry of Teotihuacán: Judging
by artifacts and paintings found inside surviving structures, residents
came to Teotihuacán from as far afield as Chiapas and the Yucatán.
There were likely Mayan neighborhoods, and Zapotec ones. As the
scholar Miguel Angel Torres, an official at Mexicoʼs National Institute for
Anthropology and History, told me recently, Teotihuacán was probably
one of the first major melting pots in the Western Hemisphere. “I believe
that the city grew a little like modern Manhattan,” Torres says. “You walk
around through these different neighborhoods: Spanish Harlem,
Chinatown, Koreatown. But together, the city functions as one, in
harmony.”
The harmony did not last. There is a hint, in the demolition of some of the
sculptures that adorn the temples and monuments, of periodic regime
change in the ruling class of Teotihuacán; and, in the depiction of shield-
and spear-toting warriors, of clashes with other local city-states.
Perhaps, as several archaeologists suggested to me, civil war swept
through Teotihuacán, culminating in a fire that seems to have damaged
vast sections of the interior of the city around A.D. 550. Perhaps the fire
was caused by a visiting army. Perhaps a large-scale migration occurred.
In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city of
Teotihuacán was abandoned, its monuments still filled with treasures and
artifacts and bones, its buildings left to be eaten by the surrounding
brush. The former residents of Teotihuacán, if they were not killed, were
presumably absorbed into the populations of neighboring cultures, or
returned along the established trade routes to the lands where their
ancestral kin still lived throughout the Mesoamerican world.
They took their secrets with them. Today, even after more than a century
of excavation at the site, there is an extraordinary amount we do not
know about the Teotihuacanos. They did have some kind of quasi-
hieroglyphic written language, but we havenʼt cracked it; we donʼt know
what tongue was spoken inside the city, or even what the natives called
the place. We have a conception of the religion they practiced, but we
donʼt know much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the
cityʼs citizenry, or the makeup of the courts or the military. We donʼt know
exactly what led to the cityʼs founding, or who ruled over it during its half-
millennium of dominance, or what exactly caused its fall. As Matthew
Robb, the curator of Mesoamerican art at San Franciscoʼs de Young
Museum, told me, “This city wasnʼt designed to answer our questions.”
In archaeology and anthropology circles—to say nothing of the popular
press—Sergio Gómezʼs discovery was greeted as a major turning point in
Teotihuacán studies. The tunnel under the Temple of the Sun had been
largely emptied by looters before archaeologists could get to it in the
1990s. But Gómezʼs 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. The picture was coming into
focus for Gómez: This was not a place where ordinary residents could
tread.
A university in Mexico City donated a pair of robots, Tlaloque and Tláloc
II, playfully named for Aztec rain deities whose images appear in early
iterations throughout Teotihuacán, to inspect deeper inside the tunnel,
including the final stretch, which descended, on a ramp, an extra ten feet
into the earth. Like mechanical moles, the robots chewed through the
soil, their camera lights aglow, and returned with hard drives full of
spectacular footage: The tunnel seemed to end in a spacious cross-
shaped chamber, piled high with more jewelry and several statues.
It was here, Gómez hoped, that heʼd make his biggest find yet.
The three-foot-long, remote-controlled Tláloc II robot is equipped with an infrared scanner and video
camera. (Janet Jarman)
**********
I met Gómez late last year, on a smoldering afternoon. He was smoking a
cigarette and drinking coffee out of a foam cup. Tides of tourists swept to
and fro over the grass of the Ciudadela—I heard scraps of Italian,
Russian, French. An Asian couple stopped to peer in at Gómez and his
team as if they were tigers at a zoo. Gómez looked back stonily, the
cigarette hanging off his bottom lip.
Gómez told me about the work his team was doing to study the 75,000 or
so artifacts they had already found, each of which needed to be carefully
cataloged, analyzed and, when possible, restored. “I would estimate that
weʼre only about 10 percent through the process,” he said.
The restoration operation is set up in a cluster of buildings not far from
the Ciudadela. In one room, a young man was sketching artifacts and
noting where in the tunnel the objects had been found. Next door, a
handful of conservators sat at a banquet-style table, bent over an array
of pottery. The air smelled sharply of acetone and alcohol, a mixture used
to remove contaminants from the artifacts.
“It might take you months just to finish a single large piece,” Vania García,
a technician from Mexico City, told me. She was using a syringe primed
with acetone to clean a particularly tiny crack. “But some of the other
objects are remarkably well preserved: They were buried carefully.” She
recalled that not long ago, she found a powdery yellow substance at the
bottom of a jar. It was corn, it turned out—1,800-year-old corn.
Passing through a lab where wood recovered from the tunnel was being
carefully treated in chemical baths, we stepped into the storeroom. “This
is where we keep the fully restored artifacts,” Gómez said. There was a
statue of a coiled jaguar, poised to pounce, and a collection of flawless
obsidian knives. The material for the weapons had probably been
brought in from the Pachuca region of Mexico and carved in Teotihuacán
by master craftspeople. Gómez held out a knife for me to hold; it was
marvelously light. “What a society, no?” he exclaimed. “That could create
something as beautiful and powerful as that.”
In the canvas tent erected over the entrance to the tunnel, Gómezʼs team
had installed a ladder that led down into the earth—a wobbly thing
fastened to the top platform with frayed twine. I descended carefully, foot
over foot, the brim of my hard hat slipping over my eyes. In the tunnel it
was damp and cold, like a grave. To get anywhere, you had to walk on
your haunches, turning to the side when the passage narrowed. As
protection against cave-ins, Gómezʼs workmen had installed several
dozen feet of scaffolding—the earth here is unstable, and earthquakes
are common. So far, there had been two partial collapses; no one had
been hurt. Still, it was hard not to feel a shiver of taphophobia.
Through the middle of Teotihuacán studies runs a division like a fault line,
separating those who believe that the city was ruled by an all-powerful
and violent king and those who argue that it was governed by a council of
elite families or otherwise bound groups, vying over time for relative
influence, arising from the cosmopolitan nature of the city itself. The first
camp, which includes experts like Saburo Sugiyama, has precedent on its
side—the Maya, for instance, are famous for their warlike kings—but
unlike Mayan cities, where rulers had their visages festooned on buildings
and where they were buried in opulent tombs, Teotihuacán has offered
up no such decorations, nor tombs.
Initially, much of the buzz surrounding the tunnel beneath the Temple of
the Plumed Serpent centered on the possibility that Gómez and his
colleagues might finally locate one such tomb, and thereby solve one of
the cityʼs most fundamental enduring mysteries. Gómez himself has
entertained the idea. But as we clambered through the tunnel, he laid out
a hypothesis that seemed to stem more directly from the mythological
readings of the city laid out by scholars like Clemency Coggins and
Michael Coe.
Fifty feet in, we stopped at a small inlet carved into the wall. Not long
before, Gómez and his colleagues had discovered traces of mercury in
the tunnel, which Gómez believed served as symbolic representations of
water, as well as the mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by
hand. In semi-darkness, Gómez explained, the shards of pyrite emit a
throbbing, metallic glow. To demonstrate, he unscrewed the nearest light
bulb. The pyrite came to life, like a distant galaxy. It was possible, in that
moment, to imagine what the tunnelʼs designers might have felt more
than a thousand years ago: 40 feet underground, theyʼd replicated the
experience of standing amid the stars.
If, Gómez suggested, it was true that the layout of the city proper was
meant to stand in for the universe and its creation, might the tunnel,
beneath the temple devoted to an all-encompassing aqueous past,
represent a world outside of time, an underworld or a world before, not
the world of the living but of the dead? Up above, there was the Temple
of the Sun and the eternal day. Down below, the stars—not of this earth
—and the deepest night.
I followed Gómez down a short ramp and into the cross-shaped chamber
directly under the heart of the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Four
archaeologists were kneeling in the dirt, brushes and thin-bladed trowels
in hand. A nearby boombox blared Lady Gaga.
Gómez told me he had not been prepared for the sheer diversity of the
objects he encountered in the farthermost reaches of the tunnel:
necklaces, with the string intact. Boxes of beetle wings. Jaguar bones.
Balls of amber. And perhaps most intriguingly, a pair of finely carved
black stone statues, each facing the wall opposite to the entryway of the
chamber.
Writing in the late 1990s, Coggins speculated that religious tradition at
Teotihuacán would have been “perpetuated in the linked repetition of
ritual,” likely on the part of a priesthood. That ritual, Coggins went on,
“would have concerned the Creation, Teotihuacánʼs role in it, and
probably also the birth/emergence of the Teotihuacán people from a
cave”—a deep and dark hole in the earth.
Gómez gestured at the area where the twin figures once stood. “You can
imagine a scenario where priests come down here to pay tribute to
them,” he explained—to the Creators of the universe, and of the city, one
and the same.
Gómez has one more crucial task to undertake: the excavation of three
distinct, buried sub-chambers located below the resting place of the
figurines, the final sections of the tunnel complex as yet unexplored.
Some scholars speculate that the elaborate ritual offerings on display
here, and the presence of pyrite and mercury, which held known
associations with the supernatural among ancient Mesoamericans,
provide further evidence that the buried sub-chambers represent the
entryway to a particular type of underworld: the place where the cityʼs
ruler departed the world of the living. Others argue that even the
discovery of long-sought human remains buried in spectacular fashion
would hardly close the book on the mystery of Teotihuacánʼs rulers:
Whoever is buried here could be just one ruler among many, perhaps
even some other kind of holy person.
For Gómez, the sub-chambers, whether they are filled with more ritual
relics, or remains, or something entirely unexpected, might be best
understood as a symbolic “tomb”: a final resting place for the cityʼs
founders, of gods and men.
A few months after leaving Mexico, I checked in with Gómez. He was only
marginally closer to uncovering the chambers beneath the end of the
tunnel. His archaeologists were literally often working with toothbrushes,
so as not to damage whatever lay beneath.
Regardless of what he found at the end of the tunnel, once his excavation
was complete, he promised me, heʼd be satisfied. “The number of
artifacts weʼve uncovered,” he said, pausing. “You could spend a whole
career evaluating the contents.”
