The Question of Sacrifice: Examining Maya Mortuary Practices through the Lens of Midnight Terror Cave

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As bioarchaeological interest in the question of ancient Maya ritual violence developed in the 1960s, it was generally recognized that sacrifice and related violent practices occurred within the social context of ritual. It should be expected, then, that caves would produce sacrificial osteological assemblages since they are also considered to be sites devoted to ritual. Despite this, there is still considerable debate regarding the significance of human skeletal material in caves. Historically, human sacrifice has been disregarded as an explanation for human remains found in caves. More recently, standards for distinguishing sacrifice from burial have been developed. Employing a multidisciplinary analysis of the Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) skeletal assemblage, we address the question of burial as opposed to sacrifice. The approach is novel in requiring that those arguing for burial specify a particular form that can be compared with the data. Here, ossuary burial is compared with a sacrifice model to determine which more closely fits MTC. Results clearly indicate that human sacrifice occurred at MTC and outline the implications of this research for Maya caves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32358