The ArchaeoTech Podcast · The Archaeology Podcast Network

Studying Archaeological Sites and Artifacts with New Technologies with Denisse Argote - Ep 211

·40 min·2 clips

Mitla means “the place of the dead,” and ERT plus ANT found caves beneath the Spanish church.

1. The Archaeotech Podcast episode 211 centers on Denise Argote and new technologies for studying archaeological sites and artifacts in Mexico. 2. Hosts Chris Webster and Paul Zimmerman interview Denise Argote, an archaeologist in Mexico who applies archaeometrical methods to Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, and Mitla. 3. The episode asks what portable instruments and geophysical surveys can reveal that excavations and surface walking cannot. 4. Denise describes portable X-ray fluorescence as a practical tool for mural paintings, sculptures, obsidian, and bones. 5. She says Teotihuacan work identified cinnabar on standing mural paintings, which had not been found there before. 6. She also explains cinnabar’s mercury and sulfur composition and its links to burial use and blood symbolism. 7. Denise says her team found cinnabar at Chichen Itza in a 2017 study of a sculpture inside the castle, also called the Kukulkan Temple. 8. She explains that portable XRF gives chemical composition, while other tools are needed when the goal is provenance or mineral identification. 9. Chris asks how portable XRF works in the field, and Denise describes it as a non-destructive instrument that looks like a laser gun or pistol. 10. She says the device uses lithium batteries, needs only light cleaning with a soft brush, and can be used on high walls and ceilings. 11. Denise then turns to geophysics and says Teotihuacan’s Moon Pyramid has a natural cave beneath it, unlike the artificial caves beneath the Sun Pyramid and Quetzalcoatl Pyramid. 12. She says that natural cave may have been the focal point for the city’s design and the fixed point on the Avenue of the Dead. 13. Chris and Denise connect caves, pyramids, mountains, and the underworld in pre-Hispanic cosmology as linked parts of a five-part universe. 14. Denise says the caves beneath the other pyramids are separate and only linked to the pyramid above them. 15. She describes ANT as a new technique in archaeological studies and says it helped find caves beneath the Spanish church at Mitla in Oaxaca. 16. She says those results support the idea that Mitla’s name, “the place of the dead,” refers to burial places for rulers and high-ranking authorities. 17. On Chichen Itza, Denise says radar survey around the Kukulkan Temple covered about 10,000 square kilometers over 10 days of fieldwork. 18. She reports two earlier plaza stages, a longer-than-visible ballgame, and a small structure near the ballgame that only the subsurface data showed. 19. The conversation stays interview-based and practical, with Chris asking method questions and Denise answering in a technical but accessible way. 20. Listeners interested in Mexican archaeology and field methods will get the most from it, while people wanting a short general-history overview may skip it.

As heard by us

New archaeological techniques raise a wider question about whether Teotihuacan was designed around a natural cave.

Archaeological technology gives this episode a clear path into a larger question: how ancient places may have been planned. Denise Argote's work across Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, and Mitla leads to the most compelling case beneath Teotihuacan's Moon Pyramid, where the data…

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Want a cave beneath the Moon Pyramid to make Teotihuacan feel less like a monument and more like a solved-in-progress puzzle?

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