Tenochtitlan's Newest Discovery Has Archaeologists Terrified — Here's Why

Under a stone sculpture weighing about six hundred kilos at the foot of the Great Temple in Mexico City, archaeologists lifted the lid off a little stone chest and found dozens of small greenstone figures packed inside with thousands of sea shells. The figures were not Aztec. They were carved in the Mezcala style by a people from Guerrero, hundreds of miles southwest, whom the Aztecs had conquered. And somebody had repainted their faces with goggle rings around the eyes and fangs at the mouth, which are the markings of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain deity. That is what gets me about this one. It was not enough to take their land and their tribute. They took the images those people held sacred, gave them the face of the conqueror's own god, sealed them in stone and buried them under the middle of their own world. In this one I go through what the team announced in February after three years of study, which is that these three boxes match three found decades earlier and together they form one single offering, placed symmetrically around the pyramid during the reign of Moctezuma the First. The first complete offering ever tied to one named ruler. And the same reign gives you the other side of it, because when the rains failed in the 1450s and the famine hit, that temple received the remains of at least forty two children, most between two and seven, dressed as the little rain spirits they were meant to reach. One emperor opening the granaries with one hand and doing that with the other. The skull tower the Spanish wrote about turned out to be real too, dug up in 2015, except it was not all warriors. About one in five were women and one in twenty were children, and isotope work suggests many had been living in the city for years before they died. Somewhere under that square there is also an emperor's tomb that nobody has ever found.
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