After a muscular earthquake roughed up Mexico City , a elephantine stone snake head arose from the rubbly grime still gleam with its sheer original colors .
At lunch period on September 19 , 2022 , a 7.7 order of magnitude earthquakestruckthe Mexican states of Michoacán and Colima . Its heavy rumble were feel 400 km ( 250 miles ) off from the epicentre in Mexico City , cause equipment casualty to several 12 edifice .
Among the destruction , parts of the urban center ’s subsoil were interrupt , causing the stone carving to get going pry out of the ground at a law of nature schooltime in the Washington ’s historic inwardness . Archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History ( INAH ) were alarm to the breakthrough and excavate it from a 4.5 - meter - deep ( 14 - foundation - deep ) pit of territory .
The scales of the stone snake are still covered in vibrant pigment.Image credit: LANCIC/UNAM/INAH
Depicting a serpent ’s headspring , the gargantuan sculpture measures 1.8 meters prospicient , 1 meter high , and 85 centimeter wide ( 5.9 feet prospicient , 3.2 feet tall , and 2.7 feet all-embracing ) with an estimated weight of 1.2 rafts .
It ’s estimated that the carving is over 500 year old , dating to around the end of the Aztec Empire . Despite half a millennium pass , it remains in remarkable shape and is still 80 percentage plow in a rainbow of colourful pigments , including ochre , red , blue , black , and white .
To conserve its vivid beauty , the INAH has placed the keepsake in an melodic phrase - tight humidness chamber where research worker will work out to converse its color .
“ These pigments , which map a famous object lesson of the color palette that the Mexica used to embellish their cultus images and their temples , are extremely slight due to the mineral and plant materials from which they were get , " Barajas Rocha , who has led many color conservation projects at the INAH , in astatement .
“ It is a sealed space , trace with plastic films and equipped with humidifiers and data logger to read and hold , at all times , the relative humidity of this ancestral delegacy of the snake , ” Rocha bring .
" Our goal is for the Snake River ’s head to lose the moisture that it accumulate over the centuries easy and cautiously , so that it comes out from the internal pore of the rock to its surface , since if the process is accelerated , color loss may pass . and even cracks or crystallizations of table salt in the stone , ” the expert stress .
ophidian playeda Brobdingnagian rolein the artistic culture of the pre - Colombian Americas . One of the most significant representations of the ophidian in Aztec mythology was the god Quetzalcoatl , which was often describe as a feathered serpent . More broadly speaking , the figure of the ophidian was associated with fertility and rebirth , perhaps because snakes regularly pour forth their hide and embody the mental process of regeneration .
