Emily Chan
At the palace of Hernán Cortés—the Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that brought down the Aztec Empire—the public is able to view a burial located at the entrance.
The identity of the skeleton within the burial has long been attributed to a Spanish monk. However, a recent study has revealed that the remains actually belong to a middle-aged Indigenous woman.
The Palace of Cortés is in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and was built between 1523 and 1528. It now serves as a museum with two floors of exhibits that highlight Mexican culture and history.
In 2017, a strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 struck Mexico City and the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos. Thousands of people were injured, and many buildings collapsed, including the Palace of Cortés.
The structure suffered severe damages that required extensive repair work, which was finally completed in 2023. During the restorations, researchers took the opportunity to survey all the artifacts within the museum, and among them was the open burial.
The burial was originally excavated in 1971 but was left in place with a label that referred to the body as the Spanish monk Juan Leyva, who served the Marchioness Juana de Zúñiga y Arellano, wife of Hernán Cortés.
The researchers came to this conclusion after they found an ancient Franciscan manuscript from the 16th century that relayed the story of how Leyva slept with his head nestled in a hole in the wall. The manuscript also stated that he was eventually buried next to the gate of the old building.
After archaeologists observed that the neck vertebrae in the burial had some issues, they connected the dots, realizing that the skeleton must belong to Leyva.
However, other aspects of the burial did not exactly line up with the idea that a Spanish monk was laid to rest there. For instance, the body was discovered in the fetal position. So, the burial was re-analyzed, and on January 18, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico announced that the burial contained the remains of an Indigenous woman rather than a Spanish monk.
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