An Assessment of the Midnight Terror Cave Skeletal Assemblage

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 association of human sacrifice with the subterranean continues to be debated. The connection of sacrifice with ritual sites should hardly be surprising. The continued debate is partially due to the generally poor preservation of skeletal material in the Maya area and the lack of bioarchaeologist working underground. Because of this, many sacrificial discussions rely on documentary or contextual data to the exclusion of biographic or taphonomic evidence. Bioachaeological discussions have focused on identifying patterns or processes still visible on skeletal material while ignoring archaeological context. More recently, characteristics for distinguishing sacrifice from burial in archaeological contexts have been developed. We review and apply these characteristics, outlined by Vera Tiesler and Carrie A. Berryman to the Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) skeletal assemblage. The assemblage is comprised of over 10,000 skeletal elements. The heavily damaged but surprisingly well preserved remains and the well recorded subterranean context presents a unique opportunity to employ these characteristics to clarify the nature of the MTC assemblage. We argue that the characteristics clearly demonstrate the practice of human sacrifice at MTC.

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): 50172