Posted on 09/02/2021 5:32:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The volume and variety of objects hidden in the sealed tunnel under Teotihuacan's ornate Feathered Serpent Pyramid has shattered records for discoveries at the ancient city, once the most populous metropolis of the Americas and now a top tourist draw just outside modern-day Mexico City.
...100,000 artifacts from the tunnel have been cataloged so far, ranging from finely-carved statues, jewelry, shells, and ceramics as well as thousands of wooden and metallic objects that mostly survived the passage of time intact.
...100-meter-long (330 ft) tunnel, which ended in three chambers directly under the pyramid's mid-point.
...which is tall enough in most places to walk through and is around 12 meters (40 ft) underground, was designed to dazzle, he explained. The walls and even the floor were coated with fine bits of iron pyrite...
Scientific dating shows that the damp, never-looted space was in use for more than two centuries through 250 A.D.
Teotihuacan, a wealthy contemporary of ancient Rome and Han China, thrived from about 100 B.C. to 550 A.D. and was home to up to 200,000 people mostly living in multi-family stone compounds painted with colorful murals.
It appears that ceremonies in the tunnel involved the offering of gifts to the lords of the underworld, and to the city's main deity, the storm god.
Among the richest offerings are hundreds of objects made of so-called imperial jade, one of the world's most expensive gems, including ear spools, necklaces and pendants - one in the form of a crocodile.
Several thousand once-glittering iron pyrite pieces were unearthed. Possibly imported from as far away as Honduras, they include beads, disks and even the bottom half of a cup.
Gomez's team is also developing three-dimensional digital recreations of the artifacts as they originally would have appeared, so they can eventually be accessed online.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
ping
I love articles like this. I wonder how they transitioned from these sort of rites to cutting the living hearts out of human sacrificial victims
I suspect it was a real short hop, though this civilization was supposedly a different one from the later Aztecs.
Am trying to find more on the history of that particular pyramid. Some Mayan pyramids were supposedly built over older single story “temple” and then over smaller pyramids.
I think that would be a very useless thing to do. It is more culturally important to allow people to look at their history in museums. After all, we aren't talking human remains.
Cool... Thank you.
This explains the Hopewell culture’s hill top fort in southern Ohio now called Ft. Ancient. No doubt they were enemies. The past museum at that site displayed hundreds of real artifacts. The new museum after thousands of dollars spent may display a few replicas. And I’m supposed to be impressed, pftt.
Problem with the museum angle is:
1. Operational costs to maintain museum and collections are constant and never-ending. Financial support is NOT never-ending in nearly all cases, and eventually you get the typical shutdown/transfer/sell/disperse activity that kills any integrity of the collection.
2. What is available for ‘viewing’ is necessarily a microcosm of the total, to limit environmental damage on artifacts, plus trying to keep an actual educational context for what is shown. Not too many people getting a cultural epiphany from masses of half-rotted flowers.
3. Once out of the environment that preserved an artifact for centuries or millenia, it begins/continues its inevitable deterioration process. Use in public displays or actively studied research collections accelerates this damage. Air pollutants, ultraviolet light, heat, cold, humidity changes - it all adds up over time.
4. The actual INFORMATION related to the items (which provide a lot of the context and value of the item) is similarly subject to loss and corruption over time - lost physical files, lost electronic/digital information.
5. For a lot of these interesting items (Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, et. al.) that were preserved for thousands of years - they are no longer protected from exploitation and destruction. Consider the risk of a Taliban-like faction gaining a following in Egypt, and deciding all of the treasures of old need to be destroyed, gold items melted down, etc. This stuff happens, and can’t be predicted even years out, much less decades or a century or two.
Accidental fires and flooding wipes out more historical artifacts than anything else, and clearly that won’t be stopped anytime soon.
Digging stuff up to ‘learn from it and preserve it’ is just a different form of looting with the slim hope that any information gained might be preserved. I guess it lets these archeologists sleep at night.
There are legends of the Feathered Serpent in Ohio Archeology. “He left others behind him, though, nearly as large and dangerous as himself, and they hide now in deep pools in the river and about lonely passes in the high mountains, the places the Cherokees call “Where the Uktena stays.”” https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2007/05/legend-of-uktena.html The Ohio River Monster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH2Q1rYXE7U What was that? The legend continues...
Babylonians also had a 52 year calendar cycle related to their goddess Inana, a religious identity with the planet Venus, described as a comet. Prayers to Inana beg her to refrain from laying waste to the lands with her fiery tresses which spanned the heavens. Ancient Mesoamerican astronomy also was transfixed with observations of the planet Venus who was the Feathered Serpent or Quetzalcoatl. Why were ancient astronomer priesthoods captivated by the need to track the movements of Venus? Why were the primary ancient pantheons devoted to sky gods that were also planets? Read Immanuel Velikovsky’s - When Worlds Collide, and then investigate the works of comparative mythologists David Talbott, Ev Cochrane and Dwardu cardona.
Thanks BenLurkin.
Teotihuacan, a wealthy contemporary of ancient Rome and Han China, thrived from about 100 B.C. to 550 A.D. and was home to up to 200,000 people mostly living in multi-family stone compounds painted with colorful murals.
The living is who matters. Their enrichment is of value.
Why were ancient astronomer priesthoods captivated by the need to track the movements of Venus?
IIRC, Velikovsky said that Venus as a comet made repeated passes through our system before settling down into a fixed orbit. During each pass, in historical times, it's close passage beat Hell out of Planet Earth (earthquakes, tilting of axis(?), slowed rotation(?), etc.) so those astronomers were trying to track down/predict when the next "coming of the Lord" scenario would occur.
I was particularly intrigued as to how Velikovsky, a biblical scholar, got into the cataclysm camp. He said that when Joshua wrote of God holding the sun still in the sky to afford the Israelites enough daylight to beat the Amorites, he wondered if, on the opposite side of the world, anyone wrote of an extended darkness.
Sure enough, the Mayans, in their flowery way, wrote that "there was a great war in the sky and the sun became afraid and hid in a cave for three days." He opined that when you were in the dark and scared spitless, a few hours would seem like days. Mebbe, mebbe not, but I thought that was it was a cool interpretation.
Of course he was vilified by the Establishment scientists, whose methods turned me away from them.
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