A bar of amber excavate in a car park in Mexico City secernate a remarkable story of colonial clash , snitch conquistadors , and some very angry Aztecs .
Archaeologists fromMexico ’s National Institute of Anthropology and History(INAH ) lately revealed that this amber bar was one of the many Aztec hoarded wealth foray by Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago . Their analytic thinking suggest that this metal bar was perhaps lose during La Noche Trist , literally " The Sad Night , ” when Cortés and his invading army was forced to hastily flee the Aztec majuscule at Tenochtitlan on the dark of June 30 , 1520 .
The 1.93 - kg ( 4.25 pounds ) prosperous block of metal was first unearth in 1981 during building work around Alameda Central , a public park in downtown Mexico City .
A recentX - ray fluorescencechemical analytic thinking of the bar – just in time for the five-hundredth anniversary of The Sad Night – reveal that it has a composition of 76.2 per centum gold , 20.8 per centum silver , and 3.0 percent copper . This is almost exactly the same composition of the gold recover from the Templo Mayor Project in Tenochtitlan . Even more precisely , the bar is extremely similar to the gold bars found around a monolith to the goddess Tlaltecuhtli at the synagogue .
Compared to other gold piece ask from Mesoamerican sites , such as the Maya object extract from the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza , the amber recovered from Templo Mayor had low concentrations of copper , just like this golden block of metal .
The INAH team concluded that this golden bar most likely originated in Tenochtitlan . In all likelihood , the block of metal was removed from the urban center during that fateful nighttime in 1520 when the Spanish flee the Aztec capital .
“ The Night of Sadness”was an especially crashing chapter in the account of the Spanish subjection of Mexico . Dr Leonardo López Luján , film director of the Templo Mayor Project , explain in a statement the novel evidence serves as a “ primal piece in the mystifier ” of this historical issue .
Cortés ' despatch arrived atTenochtitlan , the proud epicentre of the Aztec civilization , in November 1519.Amid a huge amount of tension and turmoil , the unwelcome guests labour their luck too far on May 22 , 1520 , when they carry through a figure of prominent Aztec elites . Understandably disgruntled by the massacre , the Aztec the great unwashed were enrage towards the brink of uprising . Within just a few weeks , agree to Spanish accounts , they turned on the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and kill him . Tempers continue to boil over and a frenzied conflict was sparked between the Aztecs and Cortés ’ army , forcing them to flee the uppercase .
The conquistador escape with as much looted Aztec hoarded wealth as they could hold . However , in the midst of the panic , it appear they dropped one of the prized Au bars .
Of course , as we now know , the underground from the Aztecs was short - live . Within a yr , Cortes ' United States Army was able to push back and started to siege the city of Tenochtitlan , marking the beginning of the grande finale in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire .
