This is the 'Vatican' of the Zapotec indigenous culture in Mexico

SAN PABLO VILLA DE MITLA, Mexico — The ruins of Mitla are located about 50 kilometers from Oaxaca, in the mountains of southern Mexico, built on a high valley as a threshold between the world of the living and the dead.

The site was established approximately in the year 200 AD. C. as a fortified village, and later as a cemetery the Zapotecs, or Cloud People, who settled in the region around 1500 BC. c.

Five main sets of ruins are scattered around the small modern tourist center that is San Pablo Villa de Mitla. Some are royal houses and ceremonial centers with central plazas. One is a ruined pyramid and another is a Spanish church with a dome and adjoining Zapotec patios. Elaborate mosaics, meandering geometric friezes that resemble carved lace, cover the walls. Traces of color persist in buildings that were once covered in bright red paint made by grinding cactus scale insects.

Spanish chroniclers baptized Mitla as the “Vatican” of the Zapotec religion and it was said that its wonders continued underground.. The Zapotecs, known for their metaphysical link with rain, thunder, and lightning, believed they could communicate with gods and ancestral spirits in an earthen cavity beneath their city, which led to an underworld known as Lyobaa, the “resting place.” ”.

In 1674, Francisco de Burgoa, a Dominican friar, wrote an account, based on church documents, of Spanish missionaries who had explored an extensive labyrinth of tunnels and burial chambers beneath the ruins of a monumental palace.

A century earlier, lay clergy blocked the entrances to the sunken complex with bricks and cement, presumably to keep the masses out or the ghosts in.

“The Spanish believed that demons performed black magic in underground tombs“said Denisse Argote, a researcher at the National Institute of History and Anthropology of Mexico. In September, Argote and a team of 13 scientists spent a week exploring the Mitla site to try to determine what remains of the long-abandoned Zapotec catacombs.

St. Paul's Church, a place of Catholic worship, is adjacent to central courtyards. The church was built in 1590, 70 years after the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Valley of Oaxaca. The researchers were not allowed to set up equipment in the church, so they placed seismic sensors—electrodes and geophones—in a horseshoe shape in the courtyard, to look through the layers of soil.

“We use non-invasive geophysical survey tools to eliminate the need to excavate the bedrock and disturb the site,” said Marco Vigato, main sponsor of the research team. “Our hope is to detect hidden spaces and buried objects or other evidence of the lost underground chambers described by Father Burgoa.”

Several years ago, while reading about the folklore of Mitla, Vigato thought of confirming Father Burgoa's story by probing the subsoil. In 2021, he founded the Archaeological Research and Exploration Project, or ARX, to raise funds for research. The nonprofit has teamed up with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History and the Ministry of Culture to document and preserve San Miguel Ixtapan, a site in the town of Tejupilco that has produced dozens of carved megalithic stone slabs. The ARX excavation has unearthed two additional slabs and created three-dimensional models of the “Maqueta” stone, an elaborate, centuries-old representation of a city carved into a massive basalt boulder.

Last year, researchers used a combination of three scanning technologies — ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography and seismic noise tomography — to generate three-dimensional images of what lay beneath. The studies revealed a mysterious underworld, confirming the presence of a large void under the sacristy that extended to the west and northwest.

At one point, Vigato stood in the church sanctuary. In front of him was the altar.

Directly below, hidden from view, was a sealed portal that he had determined was the entrance to the underground labyrinth.

“I believe we have found the lost palace of the living and the dead,” he said.

By: FRANZ LIDZ