Caves, Ancestors, and the Underworld: Bedrock Manipulation as a Strategy in the Development of Middle Formative Period Maya Socio-Political Complexity, Based on Evidence from Ka’Kabish, Northern Belize

Summary

Growing evidence suggests the ancient Maya conceptualized caves, as well as small crevices in the karstic bedrock (both natural and artificial), as sacred ch’een – portals of shamanic communication, which existed in a liminal realm between the physical world and the ancestral powers of the cave-riddled Underworld. Ch’een represented important ritual foci for the ancient Maya, as well as receptacles for sacred offerings. The interment of prominent ancestors and symbolically valuable materials within natural crevices or artificial bedrock openings – accompanied by ritual commemoration, competitive commensality, and the construction of public ritual architecture – represented a coherent strategy to cement a group or lineage’s claim to an area, and legitimize their authority through control of the sacred space thus created. Based on evidence from Middle Formative Period (1000 – 300 B.C.E) Ka’Kabish, Northern Belize, this poster will demonstrate that artificial openings in the karstic bedrock of the Maya Lowland were understood through ch’een ideologies of the sacred Underworld, and that the active manipulation of these ideologies served as a catalytic means of transcending existing social ranking in order to create increasingly complex socio-political hierarchies, in a process that would lead to the coalescence of divine Maya kingship, or chulul ahau.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20053