Abstract
The ancient Maya regarded dry caves, crevices, rockshelters, and cenotes as sacred spaces and accesses to the earthen womb of the cosmos, thresholds through which the living communicated with natural powers. To test different hypotheses for context-specific or diverse mortuary use of Maya caves, cenotes, crevices, and rockshelters, we describe sex and age profiles, note the presence and types of cranial modifications, compare patterns of posthumous body manipulation, and reconstruct mortuary pathways in 35 human bone assemblages from the Maya realm, spanning the Preclassic to Colonial/Modern times, the latter represented by the Lacandon Maya in the forest of Chiapas. Combining anthropological, taphonomic, and contextual data sets, we test the hypothesis that different ritual practices and associated mortuary behaviors may be recognized by profiling burial populations from caves, crevices, rockshelters, and cenotes, and both wet and dry cave deposits. The documented scope of mortuary practices involving “hidden places” indicates that every single context went through its own history of use and reuse, regardless of the specific type of context. These results suggest the need for a reevaluation of the generalized roles of such sites as human depositories and for the application of more precise techniques in the recovery and subsequent analyses of human deposits directly related to access to the underworld.
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Notes
- 1.
We employ the word “cave” in this study to designate subterranean passages in general.
- 2.
According to López Austin (1989, p. 23), we understand worldview as the articulated set of ideological systems and elements (preferences, concepts, attitudes and beliefs) that are interrelated in a relatively congruent manner, through which an individual or social group attempts to understand the world.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to our colleague Gabriel Wrobel for all his help and advice along the road of presenting and publishing this work. The referred information is either published, has appeared in thesis, or was collected by the authors as part of the following collaborative research projects: Mensabak Archaeological Project (Joel Palka, University of Illinois at Chicago, and all the Lacandon community members of Mensabak involved), Proyecto Arqueológico Río la Venta (Davide Domenici, Eliseo Linares, Thomas Lee, INAH/University of Bologna), Proyecto Atlas de Guatemala (Juan Pedro Laporte, IDAEH), Proyecto Arqueológico San José Mayapán (Eunice Uc, Carlos Peraza, INAH). Additional human remains, retrieved mostly by earlier archaeological work, are curated and were studied at the following institutions: Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Museo Nabolom, San Christóbal de las Casas, Centro INAH, Yucatán, and Dirección de Antropología Física/INAH.
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Cucina, A., Tiesler, V. (2014). Mortuary Pathways and Ritual Meanings Related to Maya Human Bone Deposits in Subterranean Contexts. In: Wrobel, G. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Space and Place. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0479-2_9
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