 |
| El Castillo ("The Castle") pyramid towers over the ruins at Chichén Itzá, one of the largest Mayan cities, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula (Donald Miralle/Getty Images/CNN). |
 |
| Sacred sinkhole or cenote used to feed reptilians ("feathered serpents" in the underworld) |
.
 |
| Mexico's new Mayan Train sparks controversy |
The ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s
Yucatán Peninsula has long been associated with human sacrifice, with hundreds of bones unearthed from temples, a sacred sinkhole (
cenote) and other underground caverns.
 |
| Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, touching the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico |
 |
| "The gods" - Mayan plaster idol, Honduras, DEA, (V. Giannella, contributor via Getty Images) |
 |
| The costly Mayan Train to some of Mexico's most touristic areas (France 24) |
.
 |
| Mexico, Maya (Oaxaca Ocho Venado) |
A long-held misconception is that the victims were often young and female — an impression that has stuck in the contemporary imagination and become hard to dislodge even as more recent research has suggested that both men and women were among those sacrificed as well as children. A
study published Wednesday (6/12/24) in the journal
Nature adds unexpected detail to that more complex picture.
 |
| Archeologists discover an ancient Mayan city in the forest that's been hidden for 2K years |
 |
| Yucatan pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico |
The new analysis, based on ancient DNA from the remains of 64 people whom
archaeologists believe had been ritually sacrificed and then deposited in an underground chamber, found the victims
were all young boys, many of whom were closely related.
 |
| Mayan Calendar is not this simple Aztec |
“There were two big moments of surprise here,” said lead study author Rodrigo Barquera, a researcher in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
“We were thinking, influenced by traditional archaeology that we would find, a non-sex-biased burial or mostly girls,” he said.
“And the second one [was] when we found out that some of them were related, and there were two sets of twins.”
Analysis of skeletons can only reveal so much
 |
| Mesoamerican pyramid, Guatemala Mayan Tikal |
The lurid notion that the Maya only sacrificed young women or girls is largely a myth that originated from early and romantic accounts of Chichén Itzá’s sacred sinkhole, or
cenote, said
Prof. Rubén Mendoza, an archaeologist in the Department of Social Sciences, Behavioral, and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (
csumb.edu). He wasn’t involved in the study but is an editor of
a new book on ritual sacrifice in
Mesoamerica [a name for Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, all of which are located in North America].
More
- Katie Hunt, CNN, 6/13/24; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
No comments:
Post a Comment