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Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas- and likely in world history-has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.

More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.

Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, are ongoing. The work is supported by grants from the National Geographic Society.

While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec, Maya, and Inca have been recorded in colonial-era Spanish chronicles and documented in modern scientific excavations, the discovery of a large-scale child sacrifice event in the little-known pre-Columbian Chimú civilization is unprecedented in the Americas-if not in the entire world.

"I, for one, never expected it," says Verano, a physical anthropologist who has worked in the region for more than three decades. "And I don't think anyone else would have, either."

The researchers are in the process of submitting a report on scientific results of the discovery to a peer-reviewed, scientific journal.

A Stunning Tally, and a Tragic End

The sacrifice site, formally known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, is located on a low bluff just a thousand feet from the sea, amid a growing spread of cinderblock residential compounds in Peru's northern Huanchaco district. Less than half a mile to the east of the site is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Chan Chan, the ancient Chimú administrative center, and beyond its walls, the modern provincial capital of Trujillo.

At its peak, the Chimú Empire controlled a 600-mile-long territory along the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the modern Peru-Ecuador border to Lima.

Only the Inca commanded a larger empire than the Chimú in pre-Columbian South America, and superior Inca forces put an end to the Chimú Empire around A.D. 1475.

Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (generally referred to by the researchers as "Las Llamas,") first made headlines in 2011, when the remains of 42 children and 76 llamas were found during an emergency dig directed by study co-author Prieto. An archaeologist and Huanchaco native, Prieto was excavating a 3,500-year-old temple down the road from the sacrifice site when local residents first alerted him to human remains eroding from nearby coastal dunes.

By the time excavations concluded at Las Llamas in 2016, more than 140 sets of child remains and 200 juvenile llamas had been discovered at the site; rope and textiles found in the burials are radiocarbon dated to between 1400 and 1450.

The skeletal remains of both children and animals show evidence of cuts to the sternum as well as rib dislocations, which suggest that the victims' chests were cut open and pulled apart, perhaps to facilitate the removal of the heart.

The remains of three adults-a man and two women-were found in close proximity of the children and animals. Signs of blunt-force trauma to the head and a lack of grave goods with the adult bodies lead researchers to suspect that they may have played a role in the sacrifice event and were dispatched shortly thereafter.

The 140 sacrificed children ranged in age from about five to 14, with the majority between the ages of eight and 12; most were buried facing west, out to the sea. The llamas were less than 18 months old and generally interred facing east, toward the high peaks of the Andes.

A Scatter of Footprints, Frozen in Time

The investigators believe all of the human and animal victims were ritually killed in a single event, based on evidence from a dried mud layer found in the eastern, least disturbed part of the 7,500-square-foot site. They believe the mud layer once covered the entire sandy dune where the ritual took place, and it was disturbed during the preparation of the burial pits and the subsequent sacrifice event.

Archaeologists discovered the footprints of sandaled adults, dogs, barefoot children, and young llamas preserved in the mud layer, with deep skid marks illustrating where reluctant four-legged offerings may have been forcibly coaxed to their end.

An analysis of the footprints may also enable the archaeologists to reconstruct the ritual procession: It appears that a group of children and llamas was led to the site from the north and the south edges of the bluff, meeting in the center of the site, where they would have been sacrificed and buried. The bodies of a few children and animals were simply left in the wet mud.

An Unprecedented Event?

If the archaeologists' conclusion is correct, Huanchaquito-Las Llamas may be compelling scientific evidence for the largest single mass child sacrifice event known in world history.

Until now, the largest mass child sacrifice event for which we have physical evidence is the ritual murder and interment of 42 children at Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (modern-day Mexico City).

The discovery of individual child sacrifice victims recovered from Inca mountaintop rituals has also captured the world's attention.

Outside of the Americas, archaeologists at sites such as the ancient Phoenician city of Carthage debate whether child remains found there constitute ritual sacrifice and, if so, if such ritual events took place over the course of decades or even centuries.

Verano emphasizes that such clear-cut evidence for deliberate, singular mass sacrificial events such as those evidenced at Las Llamas, however, is extremely rare to find in archaeological contexts.

Analysis of the remains from Las Llamas shows that both children and llamas were killed with consistent, efficient, transverse cuts across the sternum. A lack of hesitant ("false start") cuts indicates that they were made by one or more trained hands.

"It is ritual killing, and it's very systematic," Verano says.

Human sacrifice has been practiced in nearly all corners of the globe at various times, and scientists believe that the ritual may have played an important role in the development of complex societies through social stratification and control of populations by elite social classes.

Most societal models that look at human sacrifice, however, are based on the ritual killing of adults, says Joseph Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

"I think it's definitely harder to explain child sacrifice," he says, then pauses.

"Also, at a personal level."

Negotiation With Supernatural Forces

The mass sacrifice of only children and young llamas that took place at Las Llamas, however, appears to be a phenomenon previously unknown in the archaeological record, and it immediately raises the question: What would motivate the Chimú to commit such an act?

Prieto concedes that this is often the first question he encounters when he shares his research at Las Llamas with scientific colleagues and the local community.

"When people hear about what happened and the scale of it, the first thing they always ask is why."

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño.

Elevated sea temperatures characteristic of El Niño would have disrupted marine fisheries in the area, while coastal flooding could have overwhelmed the Chimú's extensive infrastructure of agricultural canals.

The Chimú succumbed to the Inca only decades after the sacrifices at Las Llamas.

Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region, at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim."

"It's impossible to know without a time machine," Klaus says, adding that the Las Llamas discovery is important in that it adds to our knowledge about ritual violence and variations on human sacrifice in the Andes.

"There's this idea that ritual killing is contractual, that it's performed to get something from supernatural deities. But it's actually a much more complicated attempt at negotiation with those supernatural forces and their manipulation by the living."

Future Histories for Past Victims

The scientific team investigating the Las Llamas sacrifices is now undertaking the painstaking work of unraveling the life histories of the victims-such as who they were and where they may have come from.

Although it is difficult to determine sex based on skeletal remains at such a young age, preliminary DNA analysis indicates that both boys and girls were victims, and isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire.

Evidence for cranial modification, practiced in some highland areas at the time, also supports the idea that children were brought to the coast from farther-flung areas of Chimú influence.

Since the discovery at Las Llamas, the research team has discovered archaeological evidence around Huanchaco for similar, contemporaneous mass child-llama sacrifice sites, which are the subject of ongoing scientific investigation with the support of the National Geographic Society.

"Las Llamas is already such a unique site in the world, and it makes you wonder how many other sites like this there may be out there in the area for future research," says Prieto.

"This just may be the tip of the iceberg."

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Exclusive: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World's Largest

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Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas- and likely in world history-has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.

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It was built in tribute to the wind god

smithsonian.com

When people walk down the streets of Mexico City, they might do so in search of a bite to eat or a glimpse at some of its coolest modern architecture. But they may not realize they're standing on top of thousands of years of history. And every once in a while, that history surfaces in an amazing archaeological find.

That's what happened near the city's Zocalo plaza, reports Reuters, where a huge Aztec temple and ball court-and a pile of human neck bones-were hiding just beneath the surface.

The incredible find was hidden beneath a side street where a hotel once stood, Reuters reports. Years of excavations finally revealed a temple that archaeologists say is more than 500 years old. INAH, the Mexican institute of anthropology and history, says in a Spanish-language press release that it was likely in use at least since 1481 until 1519. The temple-built to look like a coiled snake-was in honor of Ehécatl, a wind god worshiped by the Aztecs as the creator who breathed life into humankind.

That worship had a grisly side: Near a ball court found within the temple complex, archaeologists discovered 32 severed neck vertebrae. The body parts, officials believe, came from people who were decapitated as part of a sacrificial ritual in the temple. The INAH release writes that the ages of the bodies ranged from infants to juveniles.

The institute notes that the building would have stopped being used for worship once the Spaniards arrived in what is now Mexico City. Tenochtitlan, as it was known then, was the most powerful Aztec city-state. But when Spaniards moved in and conquered, they simply built a new city-and the hundreds of colonial-era buildings for which the interior of Mexico City is known-on top.

Though many of those ruins have gone missing, early colonists recorded accounts of the splendors that once filled the area. Bernal Díaz del Castillo helped invade the Aztec city in the 1520s. Forty years later, he recalled his amazement upon entering Tenochtitlan. "These great towns and [temples] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision..." he wrote. "Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream."

But Castillo's observations were anything but a dream. They have since been borne out by archaeological excavations that have revealed magnificent temples and tens of thousands of artifacts. The new find, an INAH official notes, gives further credence to those early chronicles and offers a new look at a culture once literally paved over by a conquering force.

It took a full seven years to dig out the temple, the INAH says in its release. So what will become of it now? The Associated Press reports that the hotel that owns the property will build a new building above the ruins-but that the public will still be able to visit the snake-like site.

It's certainly not the first time a seemingly mundane part of Mexico City has revealed an archaeological wonder. Last year, for example, another, even older temple to Ehécatl was discovered beneath a supermarket. Mexico's history of civilization and colonization is complicated to say the least, but it's never far from daily life. And it will take much more than wind to blow away the relics that sleep beneath its city streets.

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About Erin Blakemore

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Gigantic Aztec Temple Unearthed in Mexico City

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smithsonian.com When people walk down the streets of Mexico City, they might do so in search of a bite to eat or a glimpse at some of its coolest modern architecture. But they may not realize they're standing on top of thousands of years of history.

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Archeologists in Mexico City say they've discovered part of the long-rumored Huey Tzompantli, a rack of humans skulls believed to measure some 200 feet in diameter. The tower sat on the edge of the Templo Mayor, a temple devoted to the Aztec god of sun, war, and human sacrifice. While its existence has been talked about since the conquest of Hernan Cortes, now that researchers have uncovered the skulls they've raised more questions about Aztec practices.

"Something is happening that we have no record of, and this is really new, a first in the Huey Tzompantli," Rodrigo Bolanos, a biological anthropologist working on the dig, told Reuters.

Two years ago, researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History started their dig at the edge of Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral, which now covers the Templo Mayor. The discovery is one of the most important related to Aztec ceremonial practice. These racks of skulls, as well acts of human sacrifice, were common among Mesoamerican cultures. This is believed to be one of the larger such towers, and it was written about by Andres de Tapia, a Spanish soldier who followed Cortes on his conquest of Mexico in 1521. In his account, de Tapia said the rack included tens of thousands of skulls "placed on a very large theater made of lime and stone, and on the steps of it were many heads of the dead stuck in the lime with the teeth facing outward."

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Archeologists in Mexico Find an Aztec Tower of Skulls

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Archeologists in Mexico City say they've discovered part of the long-rumored Huey Tzompantli, a rack of humans skulls believed to measure some 200 feet in diameter. The tower sat on the edge of the Templo Mayor, a temple devoted to the Aztec god of sun, war, and human sacrifice.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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The chance discovery beneath a nearly 2,000-year-old pyramid leads to the heart of a lost civilization

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 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.

"My first thought was, 'What exactly am I looking at?'" Gómez told me recently. "The second was, 'How exactly are we going to fix this?'"

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 wasn't 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 city's 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 can't 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 Gómez's 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.

**********

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 city's 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 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 Gómez's tunnel. The structure's 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 Teotihuacán, and Rubén Cabrera, of Mexico's 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 Mexico's 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 haven't cracked it; we don't 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 don't know much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the city's citizenry, or the makeup of the courts or the military. We don't know exactly what led to the city's 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 Francisco's de Young Museum, told me, "This city wasn't designed to answer our questions."

In archaeology and anthropology circles-to say nothing of the popular press-Sergio Gómez's 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 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. 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 he'd make his biggest find yet.

**********

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 we're 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, Gómez's 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, Gómez's 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 city's 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 tunnel's designers might have felt more than a thousand years ago: 40 feet underground, they'd 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, Teotihuacán's 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 city's 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 Teotihuacán's 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 city's 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, he'd be satisfied. "The number of artifacts we've uncovered," he said, pausing. "You could spend a whole career evaluating the contents."

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

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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.

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Aztec Calendar Stone