What do you think about this?
In the Mexican town of Cholula there is a hill with a pretty yellow church on top. People picnic on it. Tourists climb it. Almost none of them realize they are standing on the largest pyramid ever built by human hands.
By sheer volume, the Great Pyramid of Cholula is bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, a man made mountain that grew over roughly a thousand years as culture after culture built on top of the last. Then it was slowly swallowed by grass and soil until it looked like an ordinary hill. When the Spanish arrived in 1519 they saw a hill. The church that crowns the summit went up decades later, and nobody who raised it had any idea what was underneath. Only in the twentieth century did archaeologists start tunneling in and grasp the true scale of it.
Is it possible the biggest monument our species ever raised sat hidden in plain sight for centuries, mistaken for a hill?
Lost knowledge, a deliberate burial, or just the slow work of time? What do you think Cholula was really built for?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a farmer in Sardinia struck stone and uncovered an army of giants, dozens of statues over seven feet tall with double circle eyes, around three thousand years old. Someone smashed them and buried them. What were the giants meant to be?
What do you think about this? On the coast of Brittany stand more than three thousand stones in rows that run for miles, raised before Stonehenge and before the pyramids. Nobody left an explanation. A lost astronomy, a forgotten faith, or something we have no word for?
What do you think about this? In 1963 a man in Turkey knocked out a basement wall and found a city cut eighteen levels down, with stone doors that sealed from the inside and room for twenty thousand people. Nobody is certain who dug it. What were they hiding from?
What do you think about this? In 1934 the LA Times ran a front page story about a labyrinth under downtown built by an ancient Lizard People. The city let a mining engineer sink a shaft 250 feet down. Then the money ran out. A fantasy, or a real anomaly under the city?
What do you think about this? In Cholula, Mexico there is a hill with a pretty yellow church on top. It is the largest pyramid ever built, bigger by volume than Giza, swallowed by grass until it looked like ordinary ground. Lost knowledge, deliberate burial, or just time?
What do you think about this? A short boat ride from Venice sits Poveglia, an island so tied to plague dead and a shuttered asylum that it has been closed to visitors for decades. Fishermen steer around it. Grim history and imagination, or ground that holds onto something?
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