You may have heard of Teotihuacán in Mexico, right? According to archaeologists, the town was founded around the 1st century BC and, after a major expansion that took place in about 600 years or so, Teotihuacán became the largest city in the western hemisphere - occupying an area of ​​just over 21 km ² and housing an estimated population between 100 thousand and 200 thousand inhabitants.

To this day the causes that led to its demise and disappearance are mysteries debated by scholars and archaeologists - but as scientists try to find answers to these and other questions about Teotihuacán, they end up with incredible discoveries.

Passage to the underworld

The most recent, announced by a team from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, was that of a secret tunnel and chamber that were identified under the Pyramid of the Moon, a temple built around the 3rd century. The two structures were found by using a noninvasive imaging technique called “electrical resistivity tomography” and, as the surveys reveal, the chamber entrance is about 8 meters deep.

Survey Results (National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico / Institute of Geophysics)

Archaeologists do not yet know exactly what the function of this underground site was, but it is suspected that it would serve as a space for funeral rituals or something. With regard to the tunnel, it departs from the chamber and goes to Praça da Lua, in the very city of Teotihuacán, and the researchers believe that it functioned as a kind of "passage to the underworld".

More specifically, archaeologists think that the people of the time used the tunnel to perform ceremonies and to give offerings - in rituals that would be related to the beliefs about the death and the afterlife of the Teotihuacans .

Pyramid of the Moon (National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico / Mauricio Marat)

This theory was developed on the basis of previous discoveries that revealed the existence of other tunnels under the city containing human skeletons and artifacts such as necklaces, anthropomorphic figure mosaics and stone-carved statuettes, objects that appear to have served as offerings to the dead.

It is noteworthy that neither the chamber nor the tunnel have been excavated yet, but there are plans to explore the structures as there may be other entrances to the passage. Therefore, further surveys should be conducted soon - which opens the possibility for new discoveries to be made.

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