In the eerie red glow of head torches, we could see cracked ceramics lying on the cave’s damp, clay floor. Our guide shone a white light across stalactites and stalagmites, illuminating broken stone metates – tools used by the Maya to grind corn – and large earthenware pots.
Then the beam caught the sheen of a human skull half-buried in the clay; its front teeth were cracked, and the bone had long-ago crystallised into calcite. This was the Main Chamber of Actun Tunichil Muknal (the ATM Cave) in the jungle of western Belize, and to the Maya, this eerie, fascinating cavern was a sacred entrance to Xibalba, the Maya underworld.
For more than 1,000 years, the 5k-long subterranean ATM Cave system lay unlooted and undisturbed. Locals rediscovered the entrance in 1986, and, shortly after, hydrologist and spelunker Thomas Miller found skeletons inside. In the decades that followed, the unusually pristine ATM Cave became the subject of much study, offering scientists and intrepid travellers a glimpse into Maya religion and society from about 700-900 BCE. From research at this and other sites in Belize, archaeologists knew that the Maya ventured deep into caves to connect with their deities in some way, but the specifics of those ceremonies and rituals – and the reasons for them – remained shrouded in mystery.
Then in 2021, two of the key archaeologists who’d been involved in ATM Cave excavations since the 1990s introduced a new methodology for unravelling those mysteries. In their paper – Sacrifice of the Maize God: Re-creating Creation in the Main Chamber of Actun Tunichil Muknal (a chapter of the anthology research book The Myths of the Popol Vuh in Cosmology, Art, and Ritual) – Professor Holley Moyes from the University of California and Belizean archaeologist Dr Jaime J Awe explained how they’d been able to build an intricate picture of the religious ceremonies by studying the spatial layout of skeletons and artefacts left behind. They could tell where the Maya stood while the ceremonies unfolded, which mythical stories they re-enacted, which gods the Maya impersonated in rituals and how the unlucky were sacrificed.