The lunar associations gathered loosely under the name Metztli find their most vivid and best documented expression not in a myth about Metztli directly but in the archaeological rediscovery of the goddess most closely tied to the moon in the Mexica pantheon, Coyolxauhqui. In February 1978, electrical utility workers in Mexico City struck a massive carved stone disc, eventually identified as a monumental relief of the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, and the find led directly to the systematic excavation of the Templo Mayor, the principal temple of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, buried beneath the modern city center since the Spanish conquest.
The stone shows the goddess decapitated and dismembered, matching the myth in which her brother Huitzilopochtli, born fully armed, defeats and dismembers her at the hill of Coatepec after she leads an attack on their mother; placed at the base of the temple's stairway, the carving meant that anyone climbing to the war god's shrine symbolically re-enacted his victory with every step upward, walking over the fallen moon goddess's broken body. This discovery transformed Aztec archaeology, turning what had been a scattered set of colonial-era manuscript references into a monumental, in-place confirmation of how central lunar mythology was to the physical and ritual heart of the Mexica capital, even though, as with Metztli specifically, the surviving evidence distributes the moon's story across several named figures rather than concentrating it in one clearly defined deity.