This building survived because the inhabitants of Teotihuacan deliberately buried it under a new structure—standard practice in this city—sealing it in near-perfect condition for over a thousand years. When archaeologists uncovered it in the second half of the 20th century, its greens, yellows, and reds were still essentially intact: a remarkable rarity at a site where most painted surfaces have been lost to open-air exposure. The four-petal flower decorating its pilasters is the city's emblem—it appears in murals, ceramics, stamp seals, and objects found at distant sites, confirming it functioned as a widely circulated symbol of urban identity. The shrine at the top of the platform offers a rare glimpse of what the structures crowning the great pyramids once looked like—buildings of which today only the stepped bodies remain.