Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Subterranean features across Mesoamerica are particularly important given their status as ritual spaces that carried strong ideological significance. As such, human skeletal remains deposited in caves, cenotes, chultuns, and other natural and artificial subterranean chambers provide some of the best contexts to investigate ritual behavior among ancient Mesoamericans. In focusing on these specialized contexts, it is not surprising that bioarchaeologists encounter human remains that extend our understanding of the life and death of ancient Mesoamericans beyond what is provided in traditional mortuary contexts. The goal of this session is to contribute to the theoretical and methodological development of the study of human skeletal remains from Mesoamerican subterranean contexts.