Excavation of the Temple

Image Credit: The Great Temple of the Aztecs, by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. From page 17. Published by Thames and Hudson , London, in 1988.

This photograph is a view of the excavated area of the Great Temple that is seen from a contemporary viewpoint similar to this one. Very few parts of the temples remain; after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spaniards destroyed the buildings and used the stones to build their colonial city from which Mexico City was to grow.

The remains were left buried until 1790, when excavation to install water pipelines uncovered two famous Aztec sculptures, the Sun Stone, and the statue of Coatlicue (the mother goddess). Both of these artifacts were found within a few city blocks of the Great Temple. The statue of Coatlicue had actually been re-buried after its discovery, by Dominican priests who were worried about the effect it might have on the population. It was later uncovered in 1803, at the request of Alexander Von Humboldt, a German explorer who had great interest in the artifacts of of prehispanic culture.

Over the years, other artifacts were discovered in the same general area. The excavation shown in the image is one that was begun in 1978, after workers happened upon the Coyolxauhqui Stone. Professor Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, one of the most noted scholars on the archaeology and and interpretation of Aztec culture, is the person responsible for the subsequent excavation of this site.

The page on the Coyolxauhqui Stone has the stories related to Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui.

There were apparently seven stages of construction of the Great Temple. Pieces of stages II-VI, and a tiny part of stage VII still survive. Stage VII was the final stage, and was the one that the Spaniards saw in the beginning of the sixteeenth century.

This site has revealed a wealth of treasures-from statuary to offerings to jewelry to architectural fragments. From these pieces, Matos Moctezuma and other scholars have been able to synthesize a more complete picture of the life of the Aztecs before the arrival of the Spaniards. [1]