Subadult Human Sacrifices in Midnight Terror Cave
Author(s): Michael Prout
Year: 2016
Summary
Children throughout Mesoamerica were preferred sacrificial victims, especially to water deities. Because caves were associated with rain, ethnohistoric sources mention the sacrifice of children in caves. The importance of children in sacrifice was documented early on by Edward Thompson’s dredging of the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza. More recently archaeological investigations of caves have recovered and identified the skeletal remains of children that have been interpreted as sacrificial victims. This poster reports on the impressive juvenile skeletal assemblage from Midnight Terror Cave with an eye toward refining our understanding of subadult human sacrifice using this large sample.
Cite this Record
Subadult Human Sacrifices in Midnight Terror Cave. Michael Prout. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 404281)
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Keywords
General
Cave archaeology
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Human Sacrifice
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Mortuary Analysis
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica
Spatial Coverage
min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;