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Search Issues: Update 2026-09-16 - Repairs to some of our search pages are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!
Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.
dungeon, basement, hand-dug cave, mine
The Florentine Codex, Book 11, p. 270, has an illustration of a tlallancalli. The image also bears the number 913. The text reads: "An underground hand dug cave [or mine]. It means a house which stands within the ground. Nowhere is it lit. It is a place of misery, a house of weeping, a house of death, a house of the dead, a home for wild beasts."
auh yn oncan ynin ca teuhctlatolloc tlallancalco, çan inca moquetz yn tlallancalli ynic tetzauhtahtoque = And in a dungeon there was a trial; only a dungeon was provided for them as spreaders of scandal. (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)