What do you think about this?
On the southern edge of Mexico City, swallowed by a field of black volcanic rock, sits a pyramid that almost no one talks about, and it may be the oldest in all of Mesoamerica. Cuicuilco was built around 2,700 years ago, long before the Aztecs, long before even the great city of Teotihuacan. And unlike the famous step pyramids, this one is round, a series of stacked stone rings rising from the plain.
Then the mountain came for it. A volcano called Xitle erupted and sent a river of lava across the entire site, burying the temple and the city around it under as much as seven metres of solid rock. In places the stone lies more than thirty feet deep. For most of the structure, excavation is simply impossible. We have only uncovered the top.
So we are left guessing. How old is it really, when the lava sealed away the lower layers and the foundations we would need to date it? Who built a round pyramid here, and why, before the cultures we credit with inventing them? The survivors of that eruption are thought to have walked north and helped build Teotihuacan, carrying whatever they knew with them.
Makes you wonder how much older our history runs than the parts we are able to dig up.
A forgotten first chapter of Mesoamerican civilization, or just an early experiment frozen in lava? What do you think is still buried under Cuicuilco?
