[link to www.smithsonianmag.com (secure)]

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

Teotihuacán, which once, long ago, served as a cosmopolitan center of the Mesoamerican world.

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.

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 artificial starlight within the manmade cave also had positioned relics purposefully placed within it. In the underworld floor he found first man and first woman statues. The tunnel ends directly under the middle of the pyramid, feathered serpent, well below the ground with the stone couple below.