By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer
Fri Mar 30, 8:47 PM ET
MEXICO CITY - Archaeologists in Mexico City announced plans Friday
to hold tours of inaccessible buried ruins via glass-covered shafts
looking down on the sites.
Two daylong guided tours of the sites, known as "archaeological
windows," are scheduled for April, and will take visitors to about
20 sites currently open to the public, as well as 20 more "windows"
hidden beneath stairwells, floors and patios of buildings normally
not open to the public.
The underground ruins some swallowed or encased by the
foundations of the Spanish buildings constructed atop them
following the 1521 conquest cannot be fully excavated without
destroying the crumbling colonial buildings above them.
Moreover, the city's sinking subsoil the result of excessive
water extraction caused buildings to sink. Seeking a solid
foundation above the water table, later generations demolished the
buildings and used the rubble to fill in the sinking lot,
preserving subterranean layers of temples, floors, walls,
stairways, convents and patios.
Among the stranger sites shown in an initial tour for reporters is
an Aztec stone discovered about three decades ago beneath the
city's cathedral. The stone depicts a symbolic connection between
heaven, Earth and the underworld.
However, archaeologist Eladio Terreros, head of the program for the
National Institute of Anthropology, said the Aztecs did not see the
underworld as "hell." While the Aztecs tied the underworld to
death, they also saw death as bringing forth life, Terreros said.
He added the stone has no relation to the Roman Catholic cathedral
above, which dates to 1567.
Human skulls are visibly entombed in a wall of the predecessor of
the city's cathedral, a smaller building built in the early 1500s
that is now buried under the current church.
The origins of the archaeological window technique go back to the
early 1900s, when archaeologists began burrowing down to Aztec
temples without disturbing the Baroque structures above them. By
the 1960s, as subway lines were sunk through the downtown area,
Aztec temples began turning up and being preserved even in
subway stations.
"We save what we can, and we leave other things" buried, Terreros
said.
