ENTERING A TUNNEL

An archæological team from the ‘Great Mayan Aquifer Project’ has found a sealed portal within a ruined pyramid structure known as the Ossuary, situated within the Chichén Itzá complex in the Yucatán Peninsula. The sealed feature is thought to be the entrance to a tunnel. This has not been entered as yet, but the investigators think it was closed by the Mayans themselves around 1,000 years ago and will lead to beneath Chichén Itzá’s centerpiece – the large Kukulcán Temple pyramid known as El Castillo.

Team leader Guillermo de Anda states they are looking for a Mesoamerican pattern showing a link between Mayan architecture and caves, tunnels and cenotes (sinkholes in the limestone geology of the Yucatan Peninsula that held mythical status with the ancient Mayans). He says the team will try to open the newly found portal “to see if the tunnel leads us to the entrance of the cenote beneath the Castle [El Castillo].” (But this sinkhole/cenote has so far been revealed only by geophysical imaging

techniques.) Newsweek, 14 Nov 2017.

The Mayans built extraordinary straight causeways known as sacbes, some many miles in length, which linked their ceremonial sites across the peninsula. What is not widely known is that they had beliefs about invisible sacbes running in straight routes through the air, and also running underground. It could be that this myth has a real foundation if the ‘Great Mayan Aquifer Project’ is successful in identifying tunnel networks linking ceremonial structures.