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

34demonstrate the practice of interring the dead in close proximity to living spaces. Forexample, the Maya buried the dead underneath house platforms, in residential shrines,within large funerary structures, below plazas, and in caves. According to McAnany(1995:1), the means of communication between the living and the dead were maintainedthrough a “complex series of rituals and sacrilization of places.” The Maya understoodthe importance of maintaining a physical closeness to their ancestors in an active attemptto preserve the relationships between the living and the dead. The influence of thedeceased in the realm of the living did not expire with the physical body. In the Mayaworld, the living and the dead co-exist in a custom known as “living with the ancestors”(McAnany 1995:1). The deceased represent ancestral ties to the land established overtime through the proliferation of familial lineages and the veneration of ancestors. Thisinterrelation between the living, the dead, and the land occurs in the archaeologicalrecord as the mortuary practices of the Maya.Primary burialA primary burial generally involves the interment of one or more completeand/or articulated individuals in a number of grave types. Smith (1972:212) definesburials as “interments of human skeletal material with or without associated objects in agrave.” A grave is a specific type of receptacle designed to accommodate the dead(Welsh 1988). Different Maya grave types include simple interments, chultunes, cists,crypts, and tombs. The remains of a complete or incomplete skeleton may represent theprimary interment of an individual. For example, decapitation and/or skeletal mutilationmay have occurred at or immediately after the death of an individual and before