The Valley of Mexico is a high basin that held Teotihuacan, then Tenochtitlan, and now Mexico City, and it was the ritual centre of Mesoamerica in its final pre-conquest form.
The Templo Mayor stood at the middle of Tenochtitlan, a stepped pyramid rebuilt in successive enlargements, carrying two shrines at the top: one to Tlaloc, the rain and fertility deity of long standing across Mesoamerica, and one to Huitzilopochtli, the tribal god of the Mexica who had brought them to the valley. The pairing is the theology in built form, agriculture and war, sustenance and empire, on one platform.
Excavation of the site from 1978, after a monolith of the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui was found by electrical workers, has recovered many hundreds of buried offerings: sacrificial knives, marine shells and coral from both coasts, jaguar and eagle remains, imported objects from tributary provinces, and human remains. Leonardo Lopez Lujan's analysis of the deposits shows them to be carefully composed rather than accumulated, arranged to represent the layered cosmos. A large rack of skulls, the huei tzompantli described by Spanish witnesses and long doubted, was located and excavated from 2015.
The Spanish demolished the temple and built the cathedral beside its ruins from its stone, which is why the archaeological zone and the cathedral now stand within a few metres of each other on the same square.