Archaeologists uncover chilling Mayan sacrificial site in Chichen Itza
Scientists have conveyed alarming information. They examined the DNA of 64 out of over 100 human remains excavated in 1967 from a chultun - an underground water storage chamber in the Mayan city of Chichen Itza, Mexico. It turned out that there were over 100 boys from the Mayan tribe among them. Some were as young as three years old when they were sacrificed.
Thanks to radiocarbon dating, it was determined that all the burials took place over a span of 500 years, specifically between the 7th and 12th centuries AD. The DNA revealed that all the deceased were boys. Furthermore - 25% of them constituted a closely related family. Among them were two pairs of twins. As Rodrigo Barquera from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reported, most of the boys died between the ages of three and six.
Scientists predict that for the Mayan people such a death was an honour.
"Since many of the individuals were related to each other to some extent, that tells us that it’s probable that only specific families would have had access to this burial and that not just anyone could put their kids in there—it was a big honor" - Barquera claims.
Over a hundred deceased boys. No signs of injuries were found
It's very likely that the deceased boys came from local communities. Genetic analysis performed on their remains shows that they had the same ancestral lineage as people currently living in the region.
No injuries were detected on the boys' bones, so now scientists want to examine them for traces of poison.
It was surprising to the scientists that they found only the remains of young boys. Only women or both women and men were usually buried in such tombs created by the Mayans.
"Traditionally, burials associated with an underground environment are usually fertility offerings. But when we found that this burial was all male and that many of [the individuals] were related to each other, the narrative changed. Now we need to try to make sense of it" - Barquera stated.
"We do know that for the Maya, male twins were important and that there's a story of the hero twins who went to the underworld to avenge their father. It's possible this was a memorial to the hero twins" - he added.
