December 12, 2020

Giant Building Discovered Under the Monte Alban Main Plaza

Researchers at Monte Alban, Oaxaca have discovered an ancient building under the main plaza there. The team that made the discovery was led by Dr. Marc Levine, assistant curator of archaeology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences.

The team used drones to digitally map the main plaza,  three geophysical prospection techniques — ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistance and gradiometry and high resolution 3-D images to uncover the large building for buildings. The team will spend the next two years analyzing the data.

The buried structure is 18 meters on a side and 30 meters below the surface, with stone walls a meter thick. The style resembles stone temples excavated in the 1930’s

The project was supported by the National Geographic Society, OU and the Sam Noble Museum. Others involved in the research include Scott Hammerstedt, research faculty at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey; Amanda Regnier, director of the Oklahoma Archeological Survey; Marcus Winter from the Oaxaca center of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia; and Alex Elvis Badillo from Indiana State University. Detailed results of this project are published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Dr. Levine sent me a .pdf of his research report but our server cannot process these kinds of attachments for virus protection and band width reasons. I will ask him if he can send his research as a URL. It is in Latin American Antiquity,

Sam Noble Museum has the report here;
https://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/buried-building-discovered-in-oaxaca-mexico/

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