There were no clocks and no calendars, so people looked to the celestial bodies in the sky to stay informed. Centuries ago, keeping track of time, and of seasons, was no easy task. What is known is that The House of the Thirteen Heavens was a temple dedicated to a task vitally important in antiquity: keeping time. "In many ways, this place is still a mystery, and it keeps surprising us," Coffee said. That's because determining who built the pyramids has proven difficult. But exactly what ancient society built the site remains an open question, even after more than two decades of excavation. The two smaller structures, named The House of the Wind and The House of the Longest Night, were built from the same material, he added. "They mined this tufa rock in the nearby quarry." He was pointing to the tallest pyramid, which had a rectangular base, sloping sides and a staircase leading up to its flat platform top, about 15m high. "This is The House of the Thirteen Heavens, built in about 540 CE by the people who lived here at that time," he said as we walked around the site. Local anthropologist Albert Coffee, who also helped with the excavations, began guiding tours for archaeologically curious visitors like me in 2011. Unexcavated for centuries, the site remained largely unknown to the world beyond San Miguel de Allende, until a team of Mexican archaeologists started digging deeper in the early 2000s. Grave diggers had looted the structures and even tried to blow them up with dynamite, but whether they found any fortunes is not recorded. Some rumoured that there were dead people buried in the stone pyramids, while others spoke of hidden gold. Locals had long been aware of the ruins outside their city. The timeworn edifices were erected by a civilisation long gone. The other two pyramids, smaller and less well-preserved, bore a similarly unmistakable human touch. A staircase of identical steps, etched into the hard, dark rock, had clearly required a skilled mason's hand. Located in Cañada de La Virgen (The Valley of the Virgin), an area about 30 miles outside the city of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico's central highlands, the stone formations blended into the arid, desiccated landscape like a diminutive mountain range.īut as I got closer to the largest of the three structures, there was no doubt it was man-made. From a distance, the grey volcanic rock pyramids and their encircling stonewalls looked like something that Mother Nature had wrought herself.
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