NEW GEOPHYSICAL SCANS: Mitla’s Underground Labyrinth | El laberinto subterráneo de Mitla

In 1674, the Dominican father Francisco de Burgoa found in the archives of the Mexican Inquisition a fabulous account of the discovery, over a century before, of the lost tombs of the Zapotec kings inside a great subterranean labyrinth under the city of Mitla. Over the course of two research seasons, in 2022 and 2023, an international team formed of experts from the Mexican National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH(, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the ARX Association for Archaeological Research and Exploration (ARX Project, A.C.), set out on a mission to explore the subsoil of Mitla with the use of the latest geophysical methods, including Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), Electric Resistivity Tomography (ERT), and Seismic Noise Tomography, in search of Burgoa’s lost underground labyrinth. The project’s findings confirm the existence of a vast network of subterranean chambers and tunnels underneath the site, which may connect to a natural cave system considered by th