Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
An underground tunnel that archaeologists believe was meant to imitate the underworld has been found under a pyramid at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Electrical scans taken at the ancient city revealed the extent of the mysterious tunnel.
"The finding confirms that Teotihuacans reproduced the same pattern of tunnels associated with their great monuments, whose function had to be the emulation of the underworld," archaeologist Veronica Ortega, who was involved in the discovery, said in a statement1.
[...] " The function of the tunnel may have been to reproduce the underworld, a world where life, animals and plants originated. It's possible that it was used purely for rituals, as part of ceremonies to celebrate the agricultural cycles," Ortega said.
1 In Spanish.
Source: https://www.rt.com/viral/395523-mexican-pyramid-underworld-tunnel/
Related Stories
Elon Musk has released an image showing a tunnel under Hawthorne, California, near SpaceX's headquarters:
Musk's LA tunnel is a pilot project designed to test the feasibility of his plan to dig tunnels at a lower cost and more efficiently than current tunnel boring companies operate, with the eventual aim of supplying cities and regions with underground tunnel networks that can transport goods and services while avoiding surface obstacles and traffic.
The Boring Co. is still a long way from achieving the grand vision of constructing inter-city underground Hyperloop tubes for high-speed travel, but it's making rapid progress on its initial test digging and tunnel construction, which should go some way to proving to its detractors that this is more than just a pipe dream.
Also at Engadget and The Verge.
Previously: Elon Musk Wants to be Boring
Tunnel to 'Underworld' Discovered Beneath Mexican Pyramid
Elon Musk Claims to Have "Verbal Approval" to Build New York to Washington, D.C. Hyperloop
NY-Philly-Baltimore-DC Hyperloop: Not Vaporware?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @04:46PM
Discovery of prior art proves Boring Company innovated nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @04:50PM (6 children)
How is it possible that large earthworks and even a tower composed of thousands of human skulls [smh.com.au] can just evaporate from human memory in less than 500 years?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:01PM (3 children)
Notice the temple that tower of skulls was built into was covered up then had a catholic cathedral built atop it (a common occurance all over the world with christian and muslim places of worship, in order to facilitate coversion as well as keep a close eye on the heretics religious sites so they can not be rebuilt/re-santified to their former gods.)
Similiarly many cities get filled over and a new city built whether due to conquest, disaster, or decisions to re-architect them. While our current generation finds it cheaper and easier to demolish whole city blocks to rebuild, former civilizations found it cheaper to card in soil (much of it probably waste from nearby mining, gravel, agricultural levelling, clay pits, or used for a time as the local garbade dump, then built over once it reached a level height.)
Furthermore in the case of conquered places and peoples, generally those involved in the previous regime's religious functions were either killed for political or religious reasons, or forced to convert and destroy their records of former religious history, as is still being done among hmong, mien and other 'aboriginal' cultures today, many of which, if they have a written rather than spoken record, are losing the sole record for the converted community/leader/shaman's related family units, possibly going back dozens to hundreds of generations.
People think in the modern era history cannot be erased or rewritten, without realizing just how much easier it may be today than in the past.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday July 07 2017, @05:30PM (2 children)
Nobody wants the tedious job of building a solid upgraded foundation. You claim that the previous guy's work is tremendously flawed and obsolete, chip away all the identifiable characteristics of his work, until you have enough new features to call it "innovative, forward-looking, and the true expression of of the supremacy of $Brand".
It also helps when the features being removed are unappealing, like a silly paperclip or a tower of human skulls.
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday July 07 2017, @06:09PM
Our administration inherited many problems across government, and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home, and abroad. Mass instability overseas, no matter where you look. The Middle East, a disaster. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen -- they hate us. North Korea -- a mess. Low pay, low wages. We’ll take care of it, folks. We’re going to take care of it all. I just wanted to let you know, I inherited a mess. And these pictures coming out of Mexico are shocking! Very graphic. I'll tell you, the crime and killings there have reached epidemic proportions. It's 'carnage'. Almost as bad as what happened in Chicago over the weekend: 15 shot to death and 86 injuries. People, we're all proud of our independence, but we've got to celebrate it sensibly. I'm telling you, shoot straight up in the air. If you don't shoot straight up it can be a huge problem. We've got to teach gun safety to everyone. Even the illegals. I hate to say it, but they're here and they're shooting, it's a big problem. Look at those Mexicans on Youtube. We need to get them out and keep them out. That's Plan A. But Plan B says we'd better teach them to shoot safely. And Plan C is we get them on birth control. And abortions. Don't get me wrong, I love Hispanics. But we've got too many and they're dangerous. I'm not saying purge. But we've got too many. 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:26AM
That happened to a lot of Albert Speer's architectural works, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:06PM (1 child)
Forgotten? The skulls were recorded by Cortez and his soldiers, and it is common knowledge that the Aztecs killed a lot of people for sacrifice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:55PM
Try again.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @04:52PM (1 child)
Seems like the Mexicans like tunnels, aren't they found regularly under the US/Mexican border?
Maybe these were an escape route, in case the sacrifice-ees turned the tables on the sacrifice-ers?
Going back to the early 1900s, revolutionary/bandit Pancho Villa had tunnels in his compound in Chihuahua, I saw them when visiting. They were clearly to escape if he was under attack... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Villa [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday July 07 2017, @06:41PM
The Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the U.S. @ElChap0Guzman had a tunnel. 'Keep fucking around, and I’ll make you eat all of your goddamn words, fucking whitey faggot @realDonaldTrump' he said to me. We have him locked up. And I'll tell you, there's a large inmate who's enjoying El Chapo's 'tunnel'. Inmate, get it? Ha, ha, ha. #MAGA 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday July 07 2017, @05:05PM (4 children)
I seem to recall reading the Greeks did this kind of stuff too, but I don't remember the details.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:08PM (2 children)
Let's ask aristarchus, he's old enough to have been there.
(Score: 4, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday July 07 2017, @09:48PM (1 child)
You may be thinking of the Tunnel of Eupalinos [wikipedia.org] on Samos. But it was an aqueduct, carrying water through a mountain into the walled city. Nothing to do with afterlife, or escaping. And, it was dug in the 6th Century BCE, so some three hundred years before my time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:31PM
Oh dear, I had hoped you were the younger Aristarchus of Samothrace [wikipedia.org]: librarian at Alexandria, grammarian, critic, curmudgeon, and perfect likeness of Sarek of Vulcan [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday July 07 2017, @06:09PM
Necromanteion [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Friday July 07 2017, @05:50PM
The Spanish headline of the inah.gob.mx (~= National Institute of Anthropology and History . Gov . Mexico) article says something more along the lines of "INAH Specialists Locate Possible Tunnel Underneath The Plaza and Pyramid of the Moon, in Teotihuacan" which sounds a little less definite. "Locate Possible Tunnel," from "localizan posible túnel."
Though "Google Translate" does indeed return this translation, I would say it's closer to "The finding would confirm (confirmaría, not confirma) that the Teotihuacans reproduced the same pattern of tunnels associated with their great monuments, whose function must have been the emulation of the underworld," also a little less certain. If I feed that sentence ("El hallazgo confirmaría...") up through the word "patrón" into Google Translate, I notice that it does properly translate it as "would confirm."
I'm no language expert, but I think they're excited that the big indicated cavity might be a tunnel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @06:18PM (1 child)
https://youtu.be/kh-gmO07HdI?t=3m28s [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/1u0e1ydto0M?t=4m56s [youtu.be]
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:20AM
Above videos are irrelevant to the subject and only depicts computer game graphics.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday July 07 2017, @07:39PM (2 children)
It's either a tunnel/dark space for magic 'shroom growing, or an escape route so that some leader or other can 'die' and be 're-born' to be even more god-like.
Or 'shrooms. Yeah, magic 'shrooms.
Yeah.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday July 07 2017, @11:49PM (1 child)
Savage Aztecs raped by brutal diseased Conquistadors.
The surviving result: The Brown Menace. And White America will quickly become a pile of skulls unless we stop them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:22AM
Don't worry. There is one thing Caucasians are good at.. organized killing ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @08:57PM
I saw this on an episode of the TV show Unearthed recently. Kind of slow on the reporting there if it made it there first.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:32AM (1 child)
The article is quite unclear on what "Electrical scans" are but the original article seems to have some clues:
The Mexican source [inah.gob.mx] says "tomografía de resistividad eléctrica". Here's another quote of interest:
So it seems they pushed down some electrodes and measured the current passing through various other electrodes. But that seems extremely tedious considering the size of these sites. Anyone got any knowledge how these kind of surveys are carried out?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tonyPick on Saturday July 08 2017, @09:41AM
Based on the "sounds kinda similar" possibly this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_tomography [wikipedia.org]
My *guess* is there's actually a mix...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysical_survey_(archaeology)#Methods [wikipedia.org]