Dynastic History | Templo Mayor, Mexico-Tenochtitlan — The Cable Trench at Guatemala and Argentina

On 21 February 1978 a crew cutting a trench for underground electrical cable at the corner of República de Guatemala and República de Argentina struck carved stone. It was a disc over three metres across showing the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, and it lay at the foot of a stairway of the Templo Mayor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan — the double pyramid the Spanish pulled down after 1521 and the colonial city built over.

Excavation followed. The Proyecto Templo Mayor ran from 1978 to 1982 under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and recovered more than seven thousand objects, on INAH's count. It also required clearing the block above: the buildings standing there came down, some put up in the 1930s, some nineteenth-century with colonial fabric in them.

What the digging exposed was not one temple but seven, each enlargement encasing the last. The Mexica accounts that assign those stages to named rulers were written down after the conquest, and their figures for crowds, victims and workforces are chroniclers' arithmetic rather than counts. What is not in doubt is how an enlargement was paid for: tribute owed by subject towns, and labour owed to the state by the city's own wards. The platform is a receipt.

The precinct now sits below street level between the cathedral and the Zócalo, walkways over it, traffic along the fence, INAH at the gate.

📸 Cover: the excavated Templo Mayor precinct, Mexico City, Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons