AIA Spring 2024 Lecture Series: Dr. Gabriel Wrobel, Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University

Use of caves by the ancient Maya appears to be ubiquitous. Archaeological explanations of Maya mortuary contexts in caves – in academic journals, television programs, and the popular press – have focused almost exclusively on sacrificial ritual. However, this rather sensationalist interpretation is not so clear-cut. This talk will cover some of the extensive pan-Mesoamerican corpus of ethnographic, ethnohistoric, epigraphic, iconographic, and linguistic sources to demonstrate how the Maya incorporated caves into their worldview and ritual. This talk then demonstrates the ways in which skeletal data can inform competing models of Maya mortuary cave use by highlighting recent bioarchaeological research in central Belize by the Central Belize Archaeological Survey (CBAS) Project.

Free and open to the public.