By the time the Spanish arrived
in the Yucatán and recorded the
practice in the sixteenth century,
the Maya had been performing
human sacrifice for at least a thousand
years. It was a practice necessary to
ensure, among other things, the balance
of the universe, a king’s preservation
of authority and, in a land too
often prone to drought, the continuation
of rain.
Diego de Landa, the notorious
Franciscan bishop credited with near
complete destruction of Maya writings
in his mid-sixteenth century inquisition,
described the practice of throwing
men and women alive into Chichén
Itzá’s Sacred Cenote. It was de Landa’s
descriptions that eventually inspired
Edward Thompson, the U.S. Consul in
Yucatan, to purchase the site of
Chichén Itzá in the beginning of the
twentieth century and dredge the
Sacred Cenote. Two factors caught the
attention of archaeologists: the wealth
of elite goods (gold and jade), in the
sinkhole, and the 140 individuals it
contained. Still, the Sacred Cenote was
considered the only sacrificial cenote
in the Maya world until the 1960s,
when the general availability of scuba
equipment opened Yucatan’s cenotes to
cave divers. The divers drew archaeologists’
attention to the fact that many of the peninsula’s cenotes contain human
remains, and research now focuses on
understanding why the Maya chose
particular cenotes for rituals, and why
both sacrifices and burials were practiced
in them.
Researchers in the anthropology
department at Merída’s Universidad
Autónoma de Yucatán have recently
studied over one hundred confessions
of cenote sacrifice by Maya shamans
and priests that were recorded by
Spanish authorities in the sixteenth
century. These testimonies include the
names of the victims, where the sacrifices
were performed, and the nature of
the ritual (heart extraction, decapitation,
etc.) Many of the cenotes mentioned
in the records can be identified
today, and archaeologists hope that by
diving and locating the human remains
in these cenotes, they can gain a better
understanding of the types of sacrifice
the Maya performed, and the dynamics
involved in these special rituals.
Spanish version
