Tiled pools from a Victorian-era bathhouse have been discovered under a parking lot in downtown Manchester, northern England. The excavation has revealed the first and second class bathing pools with their handsome white and blue tiles.

The site adjacent to Picadilly Railway Station, Manchester’s main railway station originally constructed in 1842, was home to the Mayfield Public Baths built in 1857 by the Manchester & Salford Baths & Wash-Houses Company. The Mayfield neighborhood was known as Cottonopolis for its central role in Manchester’s textile industry. The baths provided entertainment, exercise and invaluable public hygiene facilities to employees of the print and dye factories, their families and neighbors, many of whom lived in grimy, overcrowded dwellings lacking in amenities.

They flocked to the grand Italianate building to swim and play in its large pools — the first class men’s pool was 62 feet long — and to clean both themselves and their laundry. The wash house, just as an aside, looked like the engine room of an ocean liner or something. Victorian laundromats were not here to play. In 1878, the city of Manchester acquired the Mayfield Baths and they remained integral to the live of Mancunian workers until they building was flattened in a bombing during the Blitz in 1940.

After the war, a parking lot was built on top of the bombed out baths. Nobody thought there was much of anything left under the rubble, so archaeologists excavating the site for the Mayfield Regeneration Project, the conversion of the area behind Piccadilly Station into Manchester’s first new urban park in a hundred years, were surprised when they found the bathing facilities in such good condition.

Through machine excavation and meticulous hand digging, the team has uncovered the remains of two large tiled pools as well as parts of boilers, flues and pumps which were used to heat and circulate water around the pools and laundry rooms.

The archaeologists are using 3D laser scanning and low level drone photography to produce an  accurate, detailed record of the findings which will later be combined with historical documents and CAD software to produce digital drawings, in a process known as ‘preservation by record’.

“The Mayfield bathhouse is a fascinating example of the social and public health advancements that came about during the industrial revolution,” said Graham Mottershead, project manager at Salford Archaeology.

“As the city’s population boomed with factory workers, crowded and substandard living conditions gave rise to the spread of cholera and typhoid. For those living and working around Mayfield the Mayfield Baths would have been a vital source of cleanliness and hygiene.

“The sheer pace of change and innovation during the industrial revolution means many advancements were not recorded. Excavations like this help us to learn a great deal about what is arguably the most important period of human history and, in the case of Mayfield, a location that is so very relevant to the heritage of the people of Manchester”.

The new Mayfield Park project will revitalize 6.5 acres of industrial blight into a sustainable mix-used green space with homes, retail, leisure facilities, renovated historical structures and even a reborn river, the River Medlock, which was buried by development in the 19th century and has been hidden underground ever since. Artifacts recovered during excavations will go on display in the new park.

On New Year’s Day, 2021, a farmer in the village of Hidalgo Amajac, in southeastern Mexico’s Veracruz region, unearthed a six-foot statue of a female figure in a citrus grove. On Monday, January 4th, archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) identified it as a pre-Hispanic statue of an elite woman, the first of its kind ever discovered in the area.

The limestone statue depicts young woman, elegantly garbed in a long-sleeved shirt and ankle-length skirt and adorned with an elaborate headdress rising high on both sides of her head. Her small face has hollow eyes that would originally have contained stone inlays. She wears a wide necklace with an engraved donut-shaped pendant known as an oyohualli, a fertility symbol.

It is two feet wide at its widest point and about 10 inches thick. It has survived the centuries in good condition, its features still sharp and complete with its spike, a long tapered structural element extending out from under the feet of the figure that was used to keep the statue upright. Most of the female Huastec sculptures have been interpreted representations of the earth and fertility goddess Tlazoltéotl, but INAH archaeologist María Eugenia Maldonado Vite this figure’s posture and attire suggests that she may have been a ruler rather than a deity.

The location of the statue in the Tuxpan River valley and its general stylistic features indicate it was made by the Huasteca culture, indigenous to the Veracruz region, but there are some elements typical of Central Mexican Nahua sculptural tradition, namely the inlaid eye sockets and the knots and ribbons in the woman’s gown. Huasteca sculptures of female deities have smooth gowns. Given this combination of elements, INAH archaeologists’ date the statue to the Late Postclassic period (1450-1521 A.D.) when the Mexica Triple Alliance (aka the Aztec Empire) governed the Valley of Mexico and had cultural and commercial exchanges with the Huasteca peoples to the southeast.

The sculpture’s find site has not been excavated yet, but inspection revealed that it was inside an extensive archaeological site. There do not appear to be any monumental structures. The buildings are low and were probably residential in nature. The statue was found upside down, so archaeologists believed it was quarried from its original site in pre-Hispanic times and recycled as construction material.

The discovery sheds new light on the sculptural traditions of the region, how they were influenced by the Mexica and representations of women in Late Postclassic Huasteca art. The statue has some attributes seen in the Huasteca goddess figures — the headdress, the meeting hands, the oyohualli — but is missing other important ones — nose rings, spindles with cotton tassels, the chewing of chapopote (bitumen). In the wake of this find, reexamination of other Huasteca female figures assumed to be deities may be reinterpreted as women of status in the community’s political structure.