Experts thrilled to find ancient homes

Mexico City:  The ruins aren't particularly impressive, just some stone and clay footings for houses that probably supported walls of wood or clay wattle. And it's that very ordinariness that has experts excited.

The remnants being uncovered in the hills east of Mexico City at a spot known as Amecameca are from an ancient neighbourhood — a home to regular folks.

"What makes this important is that it is a residential area, not a ceremonial or religious site," said Felipe Echenique, a historian for the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, which is in charge of reviewing the site.

"In Mexico, we really have very little evidence of how the cities really were, or how people lived," said Echenique, who was not involved in the dig but is familiar with preliminary findings.

Towering pyramids in Mexico like Chichen Itza or temple complexes like Uxmal are well known, but the vast urban centres that supported those ceremonial centres largely disappeared.

The housing compounds at Amecameca were apparently built by one of the still-unnamed cultures that populated the Valley of Mexico long before the Aztecs appeared in the area in 1325 and founded Tenochtitlan, the precursor to Mexico City.

Rebeca Lopez Reyes, an activist with the preservationist group Guardians of the Volcanos that helped stop roadwork that was damaging the site, said researchers for INAH have found ceramic pots and bones. And, she said, there is a stone serpent's head, suggesting that the god Quetzacoatl, "the Feathered Serpent," may have been worshipped there centuries before the Aztecs paid him homage. The institute is yet to release a formal report.

The few excavations of residential areas carried out so far in Mexico have yielded fascinating details.

In Teotihuacan, one of the biggest pre-Hispanic cities located northeast of Mexico City, some houses appear to have been illuminated by narrow doorways that opened onto central patios with shallow pools that acted as "water mirrors" to direct light inside the rooms.