Not just young girls: the Maya selected their sacrifices according to other criteria, and this is demonstrated by new research conducted on 64 human remains
Devotion and death accompanied the story of the Maya: this ancient population stood out not only for its art, architecture, refined mathematical and astronomical systems and writing, but also for its religious beliefs, which made it necessary to sacrifice several people during very specific rituals .
It is probably also due to such extreme and particular habits that even today scholars pay high attention to this pre-Columbian civilization, as opulent and brilliant as it was destined for a quick disappearance. And, following some recent research, we know that some of the beliefs most widespread precisely on these habits they were wrong.
The new study on the Maya
This is specifically stated by the study Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichén Itzápublished in the scientific journal Nature. Conducted by experts from the Archaeogenetics department of the Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig in collaboration with the molecular genetics laboratory of the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, this study analyzed the remains of 64 individuals found inside an underground cave used to bury the victims of sacrifices.
Like the Cave of Terror, the underground cave under analysis (known as Chultun) was a sort of mass grave, where the corpses of the victims were placed without a specific order. Nonetheless, thanks to the advanced tools at their disposal, researchers were able to determine age and sex of people offered to the gods. And it is precisely at this point that they were stunned.
Old and new beliefs
To date, thanks also to the many remains of this ancient civilization, many were convinced that the victims chosen for the rituals they were predominantly adolescents, barely adolescents or young adults, and moreover almost always female. This was made clear by the clothes, the paintings and also the analyzes on the now fossilized remains. The study published on NatureHowever, everything changes.
According to what was declared by the authors of the research, all the remains hidden in the depths of Chultún they belonged to children and, what’s more, the prevalence was male sex. But that’s not all, because according to the analyzes conducted, the diet that the little ones followed was also identical, which suggests that at least for a short period of time they lived together.
An extreme sacrifice
What makes the sacrifice even more impressive and extreme is a further discovery, made by analyzing the remains in even more detail: many of the children were also closely related. Indeed, scholars have identified two pairs of identical twins. According to archaeologists and historians, this choice was not at all random, on the contrary, it was deliberate.
Twins have always been shrouded in charm and mystery and there was a widespread belief that they could somehow cheat death, which suggests that they were expressly sought to make the sacrifice more effective.
The same diet for everyone suggests that at the time there were, therefore, real imperial guards intent on taking them from different local communities, and then taking them to larger inhabited centers to await the ritual. Discoveries that make those habits even more bloody and that shed further light on what were the most “bloody” aspects of the Maya.
