The discovery of offerings and three underground chambers below Teotihuacan, an ancient city near Mexico's capital, could point to the existence of royal tombs, experts said Thursday.
Mexican archaeologists excavating a nearly 2,000-year-old tunnel first discovered in 2003, said the underground passageway ends at the entrance to three suspected funerary chambers that have yet to be fully explored.
"Reaching the chambers was an indescribable moment. For the first time in 1,800 years we were inside the sanctuary of the inhabitants of Teotihuacan," head archaeologist Sergio Gomez told reporters at a press conference.
"We are going to dig another meter and we are very hopeful of finding a funerary deposit," said Gomez.
"The tomb must belong to someone associated with the power structures of that era," added Gomez, citing the more than 50,000 apparent offerings found at the threshold to the chambers, including stone statues, masks, conch shells, and as many as 15,000 seeds.
"We found rubber balls ... green jade beads imported from Guatemala and something that surprised us, fragments of human skin, which we hope the studies will confirm," said Gomez.
Researchers had to remove some 970 tons of dirt that sealed the 120-meter tunnel dug 18 meters below the site's temple to the god Quetzalcoatl, to reach the chambers.
If the archaeologists' theories are proven true, it will mark the first time royal tombs have been found at Teotihuacan, the largest pre-Columbian city in the Western Hemisphere and one of the sixth largest in the world at its peak.
According to Gomez, the walls and curved ceilings of the chambers are covered with pulverized magnetite, a magnetic mineral that sparkles when illuminated like stars in the night sky.