Tehuacán el Viejo (Ndachjian)

In 2019 INAH archaeologists announced something never seen at any other site in Mexico: a temple dedicated specifically to Xipe Tótec, the flayed god, with two sacrificial altars and two stone-carved skulls that identify it beyond doubt. That find made Ndachjian famous, the Popoloca name of the city that maps call Tehuacán el Viejo, set on top of a mesa east of modern Tehuacán, next to the hamlet of San Isidro, which had 130 inhabitants in 2020 and lies at about 1,490 metres.

The city belonged to the Ngiwa, or Popoloca, people and peaked in the Postclassic; the Xipe temple is dated to between 1000 and 1260 AD. At that time it was the leading religious and political centre of the Tehuacán Valley, the same region where plants such as maize were domesticated. Local historian Joaquín Paredes Colín described it in 1910 as a scattered settlement with no ordered streets. After looting in 1989 INAH stepped in; Edward Sisson's topographic survey counted 644 structures, 29 of them pyramidal, plus palaces, patios, avenues and the Chimales mural. Since 1993 archaeologist Noemí Castillo Tejero has led the excavations, which have so far uncovered only about 40 of the city's roughly 311 acres.

What has been dug includes the Temple of the New Fire, tied to the renewal of time every 52 years; a plaza lined with the bases of 13 columns of the Ladies of the Night and nine of the Lords of the Day; a temple to Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl; and the Central Complex, with the Great Temple, the structure devoted to Tláloc and the Temple of the Skulls. Ceremonial plazas and homes for rulers and priests spread across the slopes of the mesa, and drains and water pipes have turned up. The site is part of the landscape UNESCO recognised as the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, original habitat of Mesoamerica.