There had to be an American involved..............

In 1970, a Mexican professor of Art History and an American archeologist, Acelia and Phil Weigand, happened to be visiting Balneario El Rincón, the natural spring from which the Teuchitlán River is born. In the swimming pool, Acelia Weigand found an obsidian blade, which intrigued the couple. "Where has this come from?" they asked themselves. They began hiking in the hills just above the balneario and ended up wandering among the ruins of the pyramids now known as Los Guachimontones. Phil Weigand says, "I stood on the largest pyramid, looked around and thought, 'This is unexpected.'"

It turned out to be an understatement. The Weigands set aside a summer to explore the pyramids they had found and ended up spending the next 29 years documenting a complex, highly organized society which had begun in western Mexico in 1000 BC and had reached its apogee in 200 AD. They discovered that Teuchitlán had been, in fact, a metropolis of sorts, housing around 25,000 people fed by produce from hundreds of chinampas, small agricultural islands irrigated by an ingenious system of canals, dams and floodgates. In those days the economy was booming, for these people traded in salt from the flats of Sayula and, more importantly, they were situated right next to the third largest obsidian deposits in the world. In fact, they controlled more than 1,000 obsidian mines, from which some 14,000 tons of the precious volcanic glass were extracted. In Teuchitlán's workshops, skilled craftsmen fashioned the obsidian into knives, spear heads, mirrors of extraordinary quality, unique, ultra-thin earrings and flat-bladed swords called macahuitls, capable of chopping off an enemy's leg or a horse's head with one blow. In a society without hard metals, obsidian was the very gift of the gods.

Only in 1999, after intensive mapping and investigation, did the Weigands' team, which now numbered eight archeologists, begin to excavate and eventually to restore the ruins at Teuchitlán. Today, most of the mounds have been cleared of their jungle-like overgrowth and now you can stroll along the smooth, circular walkways surrounding what were once shining, terraced pyramids built of stones cemented together with a special Mesoamerican mortar which has proven surprisingly resilient and weatherproof.