Templo Mayor Archaeologists Plan Further Research as Project Eyes 50th Anniversary in 2028
In the shadow of Mexico City’s cathedral and colonial-era streets, the excavation at the Templo Mayor continues to expand its ambitions. Archaeologists leading the long-running Proyecto Templo Mayor (PTM) say new research is in the works, alongside plans for an exhibition at the Templo Mayor Museum that will present recently recovered offerings from the Mexica sacred precinct.
The announcements arrive as the project begins looking ahead to a major institutional milestone: PTM’s 50th anniversary in 2028. Half a century after systematic excavations began transforming public understanding of the former Aztec capital, the team is positioning the next phase of work not as a wrap-up, but as a continuation of a site that still yields surprises.
While museum programming and anniversary preparations move forward, fieldwork remains the project’s engine. PTM director Leonardo López Luján’s colleague Raúl Barrera Sanromán noted that the current effort extends beyond a single trench. “The project currently involves five other excavations,” Sanromán said, describing a broader campaign that keeps multiple areas under investigation at once.
The team also intends to continue excavating Phase IV, a stratigraphic section of the site where researchers hope additional finds will emerge. In the context of Templo Mayor, “phase” refers to the successive building campaigns that expanded and rebuilt the temple over time — a layered architectural record that can be read through careful excavation. Each new deposit, offering, or construction detail has the potential to refine the chronology of the precinct and deepen insight into Mexica ritual practice.
The planned exhibition at the Templo Mayor Museum is expected to focus on offerings recovered through this ongoing work. Such deposits — often assembled with deliberate symbolic logic — are among the most revealing materials from the site, linking objects, materials, and placement to cosmology, political authority, and the temple’s role as a ceremonial center.
For scholars and museum visitors alike, the message is clear: even after decades of excavation, Templo Mayor remains an active research site. With multiple digs underway and Phase IV still being explored, PTM is treating its approaching anniversary not as a conclusion, but as a prompt to keep asking what else lies beneath the modern city — and what those discoveries might still change about the story of Tenochtitlan.
