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MEXICO-PYRAMID (CORRECTED) Apr-10-2006 (670 words) With photo posted April 7. xxxi
Giant pyramid found under hill Mexican Catholics use on Good Friday
By Jason Lange
Catholic News Service
MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- Archaeologists have discovered a giant 1,500-year-old pyramid directly below the site where Mexico City Catholics have been re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ for more than 150 years.
What was long thought of as a hill overlooking the city turns out to be a dirt-covered pyramid measuring 165 yards on each of its four sides. Squatters have even built houses on the hill, destroying part of the pre-Columbian structure.
The pyramid, located on the capital's south side, was built by the same people who built the mysterious city of Teotihuacan around 400-500, and its base is about the same size as that archaeological site's famous Pyramid of the Moon, researchers said. The ruins of Teotihuacan lie an hour's drive northeast of Mexico City.
On Good Friday, more than a million people will flock to the hill in the Iztapalapa neighborhood to watch the annual re-enactment of Christ's final hours, when a man chosen to portray Christ is hung from a cross atop the hill.
But on a recent afternoon as workers readied the steel structures that will support the actors' crosses, a group of archaeologists peered into a pit being dug a few yards away.
"Take a little dirt off the stone in the corner," Maria de los Angeles Flores, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, told a student in the pit holding a shovel.
A row of large stones outlined what she said was probably an altar.
She said the dig appears to have struck near the top of the pyramid, which probably stood about 20 yards tall.
Neighbors said they are not that surprised by the find because the area practically overflows with archaeological artifacts.
"Most people who live up here have a lot of artifacts that they have found near their homes," said Rodolfo Medina, whose house lies just up the hill from where Flores' team is digging.
Flores said the top of the pyramid was probably destroyed when Medina and others built their homes some 30 years ago, part of a wave of squatters that settled in Iztapalapa by the tens of thousands.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History, which runs all archaeological endeavors in Mexico, has been excavating in the area since 2003, but has no plans to excavate and restore the site as early 20th-century archaeologists did at Teotihuacan, turning it into a major tourist attraction. The reason is that the hill is already a well-established religious site for the area's Catholics.
The hill has been trampled by massive crowds every year since the 1830s, when local residents began acting out the Passion play.
The people turn out to see dozens of actors in a procession re-enacting Jesus Christ's trial and crucifixion, and at the same time thousands of men and boys carry large wooden crosses throughout the neighborhood and up the hill.
"Whatever we excavate here would be destroyed," Flores said.
The community's ties to the hill run deep.
In 1833, a cholera epidemic raged though Iztapalapa, and villagers begged their patron, as represented by a statue of Christ known as the Lord of the Little Cave, to put an end to the plague. As legend goes, the disease subsided, and residents have staged the procession every year since as a show of thanks.
Flores said the archaeologists will refill the pit before Holy Week begins to protect it from the crowds.
Organizers of the Passion play this year welcomed the find as another example of the coming together of Mexico's Catholic present with its pre-Columbian past. Mexico's patron saint, Our Lady of Guadalupe, appeared to St. Juan Diego just a few years after the Spanish conquest on a hill outside Mexico City where the Aztecs worshiped Tonantzin, the mother of their gods.
"We take the pyramid's discovery as a symbol of the communion between Catholic and pre-Hispanic Mexico," said the Passion play's chief organizer, Roberto Guillen, an Iztapalapa native who played Judas for the event during 2002-2004.
END
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
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