Mesoamerican Subterranean Bioarchaeology: A Preliminary Foray into Defining its Scope and Theoretical Posture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The need for a subterranean bioarchaeology emerged in the 1990s in the midst of the great expansion of archaeological investigation of the subterranean. This revealed the inadequacies of previous analyses and conceptualizations of human remains in subterranean space. It was standard practice to refer to any human bones encountered as burials, reflecting an implicit assumption that all human remains were derived from funerary activity. Early on it was recognized that the overwhelming majority of reports of human remains from caves referred to bones deposited on the surface (Brady 1989:343-344). Thus, caves produce an abundance of “burials” that were never buried. This is problematic. The weaknesses in the funerary assumption are exemplified in J. Eric Thompson’s (1959, 1975) groundbreaking syntheses of Maya cave use which, while arguing for a ritual function, never considers the possibility of human sacrifice as being part of these rituals. A subterranean bioarchaeology is rooted in the fact that subterranean features across Mesoamerica served as ritual spaces that carried strong ideological significance. Therefore, the theoretical underpinnings of a subterranean bioarchaeological analysis must be informed by a framework drawn from cultural landscapes, religion, and cosmology, an approach not typically employed in bioarchaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Black as Night, Dark as Death: Bioarchaeology of the Mesoamerican Subterranean

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52380