Entrance to the Underworld

The Catholic Church of San Pablo in Mitla is built on the footprint of an earlier Zapotec temple. (Image credit: Marco M. Vigato/The ARX Project)





A hidden "entrance to the underworld" built by the ancient Zapotec culture has been discovered beneath a Catholic church in southern Mexico, according to a team of researchers using cutting-edge ground-scanning technology.


The complex system of underground chambers and tunnels was built more than a millennium ago by the Zapotec, whose state arose near modern-day Oaxaca in the late sixth century B.C. and grew in grandeur as people created monumental buildings and erected massive tombs filled with lavish grave goods.

The architectural complex at Mitla, 27 miles (44 kilometers) southeast of Oaxaca, boasts unique and intricate mosaics, having functioned as the main Zapotec religious center until the late 15th century, when the Aztec conquest likely resulted in the abandonment of the site. The Spanish then reused stone blocks from the ruins to build the San Pablo Apostol church a century later.

Oral histories have long suggested that the main altar of the church was purposefully built over a sealed entrance to a vast underground labyrinth of pillars and passages that originally belonged to a Zapotec temple known as Lyobaa, which means "the place of rest."

Investigating this claim with modern geophysical methods, the Project Lyobaa research team announced on May 12 that they had found a complex system of caves and passageways beneath the church. The project is a collaboration of 15 archaeologists, geophysical scientists, engineers and conservation experts with the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the ARX Project.   READ MORE...