Cuetlajuchitlán

Cuetlajuchitlán came to light in 1991, while the Autopista del Sol from Cuernavaca to Acapulco was being built, at about km 188. Instead of bulldozing it, engineers dug the single-bore Los Querendes tunnel, which runs some 50 metres beneath the buildings, the only place in Mexico where a highway was sent underground to save an archaeological site. The ruins sit on a limestone hill about 3 km south-east of Paso Morelos, in the municipality of Huitzuco. Paso Morelos itself was once called Cuetlajuchitlán, a Nahuatl name read as 'place of red flowers' or 'withered place'.

People lived here for around nine centuries. By about 600 BC it was a small village tied to the Olmec settlements of the Balsas basin; between 200 BC and AD 200 it became one of the largest and most complex centres in north-western Guerrero, linked to the Mezcala style, and spread over roughly 35 hectares. Late in the third century, apparently after a run of poor harvests, the population moved away, perhaps toward the Mezcala river. Newcomers built simple houses over the old public spaces, and by about AD 300 the site was empty. When the Aztecs conquered the region it had been abandoned for some 1,200 years.

The town was laid out on two axes aligned with the cardinal points, with stone-paved lanes branching off between housing compounds, ceremonial enclosures and sunken patios. It was built with long dressed limestone blocks and with stone drums used as columns, which locals call quesos, cheeses. A local hallmark is the ceja, a recessed ledge on walls and tubs that spreads the load and doubles as decoration. There were drains, cisterns, grain stores and workshops making greenstone beads and axes, and offerings in the burials show contact with the Morelos valley, the Mezcala river and the Pacific coast.

Only about 2 of the 35 hectares have been dug, in excavations led by archaeologists Arturo Talavera and Rubén Manzanilla; that area holds eight building complexes and yielded two Mezcala-style sculptures.