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

Teotihuacn
The chance discovery beneath a nearly 2,000-year-old pyramid leads to the heart of a lost
civilization
In the fall of 2003, a heavy rainstorm swept through the ruins of Teotihuacn, the pyramid-studded, preAztec 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 citys
central courtyard buckled and broke. One morning, Sergio Gmez, an archaeologist with Mexicos 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 Teotihuacns southeast
quadrant.
My first thought was, What exactly am I looking at? Gmez told me recently. The second was, How
exactly are we going to fix this?
Gmez 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 decadesalmost all of his
professional careerworking in and around Teotihuacn, 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 wasnt anything beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent beyond
dirt, fossils and rock. Gmez 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.
Gmez 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 Teotihuacn (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), the citys 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. Gmez 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
proportionsthe type of achievement that can make a career.
The problem was, he told me, you cant just dive in and start tearing up earth. You have to have a clear
hypothesis, and you have to get approval.
Gmez 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 Teotihuacn 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 Gmezs computers. By 2005, the digital map was complete.
As Gmez 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, Gmez thought to himself, was meant to stay hidden
forever.
**********

Teotihuacn 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. Teotihuacn 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-culturean ancestor of theirsmust 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.
Teotihuacn 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 citys 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 founders creation myth. Not only was
Teotihuacn 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 suggestedthe same temple that hid
Sergio Gmezs tunnel. The structures 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.
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 Teotihuacanos connection to their gods.
In 2004, Saburo Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of Japan and Arizona State University,
who has spent decades studying Teotihuacn, and Rubn Cabrera, of Mexicos 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, Teotihuacn grew rapidly. Locals harvested beans, avocados, peppers and squash
on fields raised in the middle of shallow lakes and swamplanda technique known as chinampaand kept
chickens and turkeys. Several heavily trafficked trade routes were established, linking Teotihuacn 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, Teotihuacn 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 Teotihuacn: Judging by artifacts and paintings found inside surviving structures, residents
came to Teotihuacn from as far afield as Chiapas and the Yucatn. There were likely Mayan neighborhoods,
and Zapotec ones. As the scholar Miguel Angel Torres, an official at Mexicos National Institute for
Anthropology and History, told me recently, Teotihuacn 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 Teotihuacn; and, in the depiction of shieldand spear-toting warriors, of clashes with other local city-states. Perhaps, as several archaeologists suggested
to me, civil war swept through Teotihuacn, 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 largescale migration occurred.
In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city of Teotihuacn 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 Teotihuacn, 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 quasihieroglyphic written language, but we havent cracked it; we dont 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
dont know much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the citys citizenry, or the makeup of the
courts or the military. We dont know exactly what led to the citys 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 Franciscos de Young Museum, told me, This city wasnt designed to answer our
questions.
In archaeology and anthropology circlesto say nothing of the popular pressSergio Gmezs discovery
was greeted as a major turning point in Teotihuacn 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 Gmezs tunnel had
been sealed off for some 1,800 years: Its treasures would be pristine.
In 2009, the government granted Gmez 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, Gmez
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 Gmez: This was not a
place where ordinary residents could tread.
A university in Mexico City donated a pair of robots, Tlaloque and Tlloc II, playfully named for Aztec rain
deities whose images appear in early iterations throughout Teotihuacn, 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, Gmez hoped, that hed make his biggest find yet.
**********
I met Gmez 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 CiudadelaI heard scraps of Italian,
Russian, French. An Asian couple stopped to peer in at Gmez and his team as if they were tigers at a zoo.
Gmez looked back stonily, the cigarette hanging off his bottom lip.
Gmez 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 were 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 Garca, 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 out1,800-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, Gmez 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 Teotihuacn by
master craftspeople. Gmez 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, Gmezs team had installed a ladder that led down
into the eartha 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, Gmezs workmen had installed several dozen feet of scaffoldingthe 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 Teotihuacn 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 sidethe Maya, for instance, are famous for their warlike kingsbut unlike Mayan cities,
where rulers had their visages festooned on buildings and where they were buried in opulent tombs,
Teotihuacn 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 Gmez and his colleagues might finally locate one such tomb, and thereby solve one of the
citys most fundamental enduring mysteries. Gmez 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, Gmez and his colleagues had
discovered traces of mercury in the tunnel, which Gmez believed served as symbolic representations of
water, as well as the mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by hand. In semi-darkness, Gmez
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
tunnels designers might have felt more than a thousand years ago: 40 feet underground, theyd replicated the
experience of standing amid the stars.
If, Gmez 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 starsnot of this earthand
the deepest night.
I followed Gmez 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.
Gmez 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 Teotihuacn 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, Teotihuacns role in it, and probably also the birth/emergence of
the Teotihuacn people from a cavea deep and dark hole in the earth.
Gmez 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 explainedto the Creators of the universe, and of the city, one
and the same.
Gmez 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 citys 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 Teotihuacns
rulers: Whoever is buried here could be just one ruler among many, perhaps even some other kind of holy
person.
For Gmez, 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 citys
founders, of gods and men.
A few months after leaving Mexico, I checked in with Gmez. 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,
hed be satisfied. The number of artifacts weve uncovered, he said, pausing. You could spend a whole
career evaluating the contents.