Teotihaucan Burial Chambers

As we wrapped up class this week Professor Watrall finished with asking the question is there anything else to be discovered? And he pointed out a specific sight that has just recently undergone more excavation and revealed great new findings. And that sight was the sight of the ancient city of Teotihuacan just outside of Mexico City. Like Professor Watrall said we know much more about this sight than we do about others, which is surprising seeing that we are still finding out new things about it til this day. That being said I wanted to talk about what exactly was discovered earlier this year.

It all started just over ten years in ago in 2003 when a tunnel was found underneath the ancient city. Specifically the tunnel was located underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The tunnel was found after a rain storm revealed an access point to the tunnel. The tunnel itself took a very long time to excavate.The head architect said that it was a slow process because of how far below the surface they were going. Though in 2013 they found two chambers at the end of the tunnel that had a few artifacts in them. And after another year of hard work and excavations three more chambers were found in October of 2014. Unlike the first chambers these chambers had thousands of artifacts inside from all over latin america. There were rubber balls, statues, shells and even some residue from human skin which has lead the archaeologists to believe that there could be burial chambers hidden somewhere in the ground beneath these chambers. And seeing that these chambers are located beneath one of the most sacred buildings in the ancient city of Teotihuacan archaeologists and historians believe the chambers could possibly belong to royalty.

Whether or not the burial chambers of royalty will be found is still up in the air but what we do know is that there is much more to be discovered in this world. Not only was this huge discovery in a city dating back to 150 BC made recently but also in late 2014 Canadian archaeologists found the wrecked ship the HMS Erebus from the Franklin Expedition over 150 years ago. These discoveries will give us insight into mysteries that have been trying to be solved for many years and just proves that there is still much out there to be uncovered and that there is still much for us to learn about the past and where we all came from.

4 thoughts on “Teotihaucan Burial Chambers

  1. The ongoing discoveries at Teotihuacan are endlessly fascinating to me. As you mentioned, the burial chambers could be royal ones, which could shed a great deal of light on the aristocracy and ruler-ship of the city-state and how the leadership and religion interacted with one another. I mentioned this in my blog post for this week, but a recent discovery by the team at Teotihuacan as just discovered liquid mercury at the site as well, which is used primarily in royal settings in Mesoamerican cultures, so this could further indicate a possible royal burial chamber that has already been found and we just don’t know it, or another as of yet undiscovered one.

    It just amazes me personally that these discoveries are happening right now even after all the ongoing work at the site. It really shows how much work is left in the field of archaeology. Like you said, these ongoing discoveries in long held studies shows just how much there is left to know, which I think personally is a fitting allegory to the ongoing pursuit of knowledge in mankind. The past is like a huge well that we can bring up endless amounts of water with to drink from in how much knowledge and culture there is left to dig up and study. I personally can’t wait to see what will come out of these sites and possibly new ones in the future.

  2. I think it’s amazing that even after hundreds of years of discovery and excavations, there are still so many things that archaeologists are just unearthing. After reading your post, I became interesting in looking up the most recent archaeological finds.
    One such find is a mystery tomb found underneath a mound called Kasta Hill at Amphipolis in northern Greece. This tomb consisted of winding passages decorated with headless sphinx statues, extremely large statues of females on the walls, and floors decorated with mosaics. These passages lead to the remains of an individual with an unknown identity (as of right now). By doing a geophysical scan of Kasta Hill, archaeologists believe there may be more structures underneath the tomb. Also in Greece, just off of the coast of Antikythera Island, a trove of artifacts that may have originated from a well-known ancient shipwreck have been discovered. This wreck, which is called the “Titanic of the ancient world”, is believed to have been a Roman commercial vessel. This ship carried numerous Greek treasures and sank more than two thousand years ago. The wreck itself and many of the treasures it had been carrying were discovered by Greek sponge divers about one hundred years ago. However, these newly discovered artifacts at the bottom of the sea are believed to be even more treasures that had been on the ship when it sank. One of the most amazing finds in the past year has been a piece of aircraft debris that was found by a research team on Nikumaroro (a coral atoll in the southwestern Pacific). Rick Gillespie, head of the research team, believes that this is a piece of Amelia Earhart’s plane, the Electra. Hopefully, if this is true, Gillespie and others will finally be able to confirm what actually had happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.
    The Earth is a mysterious place, and I know that there are still so many archaeological finds left to uncover. It will be interesting to see what these will be in the future.

  3. I think that the Teotihuacan burial chambers are truly amazing. Not only do they give archaeologists a new perspective on Latin American culture because they contained artifacts previously unseen in other sites excavated. This discovery opened new doors, both figuratively and literally, to further understanding of these civilizations. It is incredible that ancient people had the skills to construct these kinds of burial chambers and have hidden them so well that they remain unfound for centuries, often being discovered by accident. In this case it was only after a rainfall that the entrance to the tunnel was unearthed. I also find it interesting that there are many similarities in the burial customs of ancient civilizations. Both the Teotihuacan people and the more well-known ancient Egyptians created elaborate burial chambers underground for their important deceased and hid the entrance to protect the dead. It really says something about the nature of humans even spanning across continents.
    The other thing I took away from learning about the Teotihuacan chambers is that there are so many ancient sites that we have no idea are still out there. This site was only discovered about ten years ago and there is still much to be explored and learned about. This is also evident by the even more recent discovery of the ships from the Franklin Expedition. Even though much was already know about the expedition and the demise of the explorers, the ship was only just found. This shows that even in sites that we think we know about there is always more to find and learn about.

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