It begins with an award ceremony for the top 10 recent discoveries, and as one of the judges, I have had privileged insight into hundreds of nominations.
One of these took one’s breath away.
Teotihuacan 1700 years ago was a great city in Mexico, laid out on a grid pattern of streets and wealthy apartment buildings around a central precinct dominated by three huge pyramids, of the sun, moon and the feathered serpent.
I was lucky enough years ago to explore this mystical place, named "The Birthplace of the Gods" by the much later Aztecs.
There was then an enduring and unanswered question: what was the actual purpose of these pyramids?
Heavy rains in 2003 led to an observant archaeologist, Sergio Gomez Chavez, noticing a sunken hole in front of the temple of the Feathered Serpent. He opened it further and was lowered deep into the ground, where he encountered the opening of a tunnel.
Over several years, a remotely guided vehicle probed deeply under the pyramid, followed by his team of scientists who followed in the footsteps of Alice in Wonderland as they entered a recreation of the ancient underworld.
Pyrites inserted into the ceiling shone like the stars on a clear night over lakes of liquid mercury.
These pyramids were not tombs for dead kings, but temples to the gods of creation.
The interior chambers of the Egyptian pyramids are echoingly empty after the looters emptied them, but the Feathered Serpent temple tunnels was found just as the last priests left it.
A box contained beetles wings, there were caches of rare seashells and jade statues of the gods of the rains with shining eyes.
The temples of the sun and moon also had subterranean tunnels leading to sacrificial chambers.
Ten headless skeletons were found in one, and a group of jaguars in another, along with the bones of golden eagles.
Under the sway of the city elite, a huge amount of labour went into the construction of these temple monuments.
This should not surprise. It continues to this day, as seen in the recent restoration of Notre Dame in Paris.
