[Aztlan] MEXICO CITY ARCHAEOLOGISTS TO ALLOW BURIED TREASURES TO BE SEEN

[michael ruggeri]

Mexico opens windows on buried treasures

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer

Fri Mar 30, 9:06 PM ET

MEXICO CITY - Archaeologists in Mexico City announced plans Friday to  
hold tours of inaccessible buried ruins via glass-covered shafts  
looking down on the sites.

Two daylong guided tours of the sites, known as "archaeological  
windows," are scheduled for April, and will take visitors to about 20  
sites currently open to the public, as well as 20 more "windows"  
hidden beneath stairwells, floors and patios of buildings normally  
not open to the public.

The underground ruins — some swallowed or encased by the foundations  
of the Spanish buildings constructed atop them following the 1521  
conquest — cannot be fully excavated without destroying the crumbling  
colonial buildings above them.

Moreover, the city's sinking subsoil — the result of excessive water  
extraction — caused buildings to sink. Seeking a solid foundation  
above the water table, later generations demolished the buildings and  
used the rubble to fill in the sinking lot, preserving subterranean  
layers of temples, floors, walls, stairways, convents and patios.

Among the stranger sites shown in an initial tour for reporters is an  
Aztec stone discovered about three decades ago beneath the city's  
cathedral. The stone depicts a symbolic connection between heaven,  
Earth and the underworld.

However, archaeologist Eladio Terreros, head of the program for the  
National Institute of Anthropology, said the Aztecs did not see the  
underworld as "hell." While the Aztecs tied the underworld to death,  
they also saw death as bringing forth life, Terreros said. He added  
the stone has no relation to the Roman Catholic cathedral above,  
which dates to 1567.

Human skulls are visibly entombed in a wall of the predecessor of the  
city's cathedral, a smaller building built in the early 1500s that is  
now buried under the current church.

The origins of the archaeological window technique go back to the  
early 1900s, when archaeologists began burrowing down to Aztec  
temples without disturbing the Baroque structures above them. By the  
1960s, as subway lines were sunk through the downtown area, Aztec  
temples began turning up — and being preserved — even in subway  
stations.

"We save what we can, and we leave other things" buried, Terreros said.



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