The Stone at the Foot of the Pyramid

On 21 February 1978, electric-company workers digging at the corner of the cathedral in the heart of Mexico City struck a huge carved disk. It proved to be the Coyolxauhqui Stone: a monolith about 3.25 metres across, showing the goddess naked, beheaded and dismembered, her severed limbs jointed with monster-masks, the bells of her name on her cheek. It had lain where the Mexica set it, at the very foot of the stairway on the Huitzilopochtli side of the Templo Mayor, the double pyramid at the centre of Tenochtitlan.

The find was decisive for archaeology. It fixed the location of the Templo Mayor beneath the colonial city and launched the long Templo Mayor Project under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, which has excavated the temple and thousands of buried offerings ever since. Its meaning was plain from where it lay. The pyramid was Coatepec made in stone; the shrine of Huitzilopochtli stood at the summit where he was born victorious, and the image of his defeated sister lay broken at the bottom. Victims sacrificed at the top were rolled down the steps to come to rest on her, their bodies re-enacting her dismemberment. The atlas records this monolith as the artifact anchor for the goddess: the single object through which most people now meet her.