A study of human remains deposited over 800 years at the Maya city of Chichen Itza challenges long-held assumptions about the age and gender of sacrifice victims.
The Great Pyramid at Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The Maya city reached its peak around 1,000 years ago.Almost 60 years ago, archaeologists discovered a cache of human bones in an underground cistern in Chichén Itzá, one of the most powerful cities of the ancient Maya. The cistern was connected to a cave located only a couple hundred feet from the Sacred Cenote, a water-filled sinkhole filled with the remains of hundreds of human sacrifices.
Most of the people buried there were interred before the 900s—roughly when Chichén Itzá was the dominant city of the northern Maya lowlands, which covered what are now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, northern Guatemala, and Belize. Identical twins occur only in about 0.4 percent of births, so finding two pairs of such twins among 64 burials is much higher than would be expected by chance, Barquera notes.It’s not clear how widespread human sacrifice was among the Maya, although there are many Spanish reports of practice after they arrived in the Maya territories in the early 16th century.
“We couldn’t find any cut marks or any lesions that would point to specific methods of sacrifice,” Barquera says. “This indicates that the sacrifice did not involve, for example, heart extraction or decapitation—so maybe it was a different kind of sacrificial method.”
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