On September 19, 2022, Mexico City experienced a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake caused significant damage to thousands of buildings, developing 2,000 aftershocks in its wake. But the earthquake did something else: it caused the unearthing of a long-lost art piece. Buried underneath the ground near the city center, a 500-year-old sculpture was revealed, revealing a direct link to the Aztec Empire.
Image credits: LANCIC/UNAM/INAH.
The Aztecs integrated a multitude of serpents into their art, mostly affected by divine beings like Quetzalcoatl, who was typically depicted as a feathered serpent. Its unclear if this newly-founded sculpture depicts him. Archaeologists will continue doing studies on the temporality, iconography and symbolism of the snake-looking sculpture.
Frances Berdan, a teacher of sociology at California State University, San Bernardino, not associated with the study, told Live Science that the size and the artistry of the sculpture are impressive. However, he specifically highlighted the survival of the colors, which enables getting “a great picture of the visual impact” of such sculptures.
” These pigments, which represent a popular example of the color scheme that the Mexica (the civilization also called Aztecs) used to embellish their cult images and their temples, are incredibly fragile due to the mineral and plant products from which they were acquired,” Barajas Rocha, from the INAH, said in a press release.
To maintain the colors as much as possible, the scientists have now put the snake inside a humidity chamber and will deal with color conservation up until early 2024. They are optimistic that the accumulated moisture within the snakes head, collected over the centuries, will slowly dissipate without hurting the stones surface area finish.
The snake was eliminated from its initial website through a crane. When discovered, it was 4.5 meters deep within the Tenochtitlan website– the ancient capital of the Aztec empire situated at the website of contemporary Mexico City. Other snakehead sculptures had been previously discovered at Tenochtitlan however this one is particularly striking due to the fact that it still maintained its colors.
Archaeologists from Mexicos National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recuperated a stone measuring 1.8 meters long, 1 meter high and 85 centimetres broad. It portrays a giant snakehead thoroughly sculpted, featuring a pair of eyes, a semi-open mouth and scales. About 80% of the surface still includes red, blue and black pigments.
An excellent snake (head).
” Our goal is for the snakehead to lose the moisture it has actually collected over the centuries slowly and thoroughly, so that it escapes from the internal pores of the rock to its surface area, due to the fact that if the process is accelerated it can cause loss of colour and even splitting or crystallisation of salts in the stone,” Rocha said in a news release.
On September 19, 2022, Mexico City experienced a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake triggered considerable damage to thousands of structures, creating 2,000 aftershocks in its wake. The earthquake did something else: it led to the unearthing of a long-lost piece of art. Buried underneath the ground near the city center, a 500-year-old sculpture was uncovered, revealing a direct link to the Aztec Empire.