HUMAN SKELETAL REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT MAYA IN THE ...

1CHAPTER IINTRODUCTIONCaves have been used as functional spaces for hundreds of thousands of years.The archaeological record illustrates that caves provided shelter to our earliest ancestors.Other lines of evidence have demonstrated that caves served a purpose beyond that ofprotection and shelter against the elements. The cultural role of the cave as sacred spacehas manifested itself on a global scale. The ancient Maya were a people that assignedsacred and ritual significance to the subterranean world. Over the decades,archaeological efforts have procured an abundance of artifactual and skeletal materialfrom numerous caves in the Maya area. This intentional deposition of material clearlyillustrates the importance of the cave in the Maya worldview. Ceramic found in thesecaves provide evidence for early use, dating to the Late Preclassic (300 BC-AD 250) andextending into the Early and Late Classic periods (AD 250-900) (Coe 1999).This thesis will focus on the role of caves in the Maya world, and specifically thetreatment and disposal of human remains in caves. The main objective of thisinvestigation is to illustrate the sacred significance of these caves through a quantitativeanalysis of one of the largest collections of human skeletal material procured from anysystem of caves in the Maya area. A large proportion of the skeletal sample wasrecovered from five caves associated with the Maya site of Dos Pilas in Guatemala(Figure 1). Skeletal remains were also collected from a sixth cave located underneath____________This thesis follows the style and format of the American Journal of PhysicalAnthropology.