swallow up beneath the streets of Mexico City for some 500 years , archaeologists have uncovered the sensational stiff of anancient Aztec temple , a ball court , and a potential sacrificial region . The remains are suppose to date to the Spanish conquering , and aid the squad build a more elaborated scene of the urban center of Tenochtitlan before it fall to the conquistador .
Despite its ruinous end , the tabernacle is preserved in arresting detail , with white stucco still seeable on some of the walls . The construction was dedicated tothe god of the winding , Ehecatl , and may have been exceed with a social organization that resemble a giant , curled serpent , which the priests entered via a threshold made to look like its nose . site in the center of the ancient city , it was placed in the most sacred ceremonial region of the Aztec imperium .
Excitingly , they have also uncovered the partialremains of a lump courtalongside the temple . The Mesoamerican ball game involved participants using only their hip to hit a galosh ball around the court . These games often involved human sacrifice , with archeologist finding 32 severed male person vertebra nearby .
“ It was an offering associated with the ball game , just off the stairway , ” archaeologist Raul Barrera toldReuters . “ The vertebra , or necks , sure as shooting came from victims who were sacrifice or decapitated . ”
The structures are thought to have been built during the reign of Aztec Saturnia pavonia Ahuizotl , who reign between the years 1486 and 1502 , and just before Moctezuma come up to power , who was finally toppled by the Spanish .
Incredibly , the archaeologists think that the testis court may have been where the infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés watched a Mesoamerican ball game when he was receive into the metropolis by Moctezuma , as described in the account recounting the Spanish invasion and destruction of the Central and South American Aztec and Inca civilizations .
At the clock time of Cortés ’ arrival in 1519 , Tenochtitlan is thought to have been not only the large city in the Americas , but one of the largest in the world . With a population approximate between 200,000 and 300,000 , it would even have eclipse London under Henry VIII during the same period . An astonishing feat of engineering , the city was built on an island and connected to the mainland by vast causeways run in all directions .
There are now plans to build a museum on the site and open up it up to the world , although the date of this is still unknown .
