The Maya liked to keep their dead close. That was how they believed they could interact with their ancestors, who had ascended to the heavens to become deities. And it seems they had a very literal interpretation of “close”—namely, depositing their relatives’ body parts near long-dead ancestors.
An international team of researchers conducted a genetic analysis of 430 human skeletal and tooth samples retrieved from known Maya tombs and caves with human remains. This included an elite Maya woman who died and was interred in a cave sometime between 250 and 400 CE. What made this burial site stick out to researchers were 226 human teeth scattered around her pelvis and upper spine—teeth that, as the team’s analysis found, belonged to generations of her distant ancestors buried elsewhere in tombs more than 16 miles (26 kilometers) away.
Of course, one doesn’t need to be a geneticist to guess that all those teeth didn’t belong to the woman. However, the genetic connection reveals fascinating insights into Maya burial practices and social structures, according to the team’s study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and is currently available as a preprint on bioRxiv. Keith Prufer, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico who co-led the study, presented the work at the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) annual meeting earlier this year.
Til death do us (not) part
Like many of its contemporaries, the Maya cared deeply about the afterlife. They had very specific ideas about what happened after death and how best to prepare people for their ascent to the heavens. According to the paper, this was also related to how political and economic elites established their legitimacy—namely, that their ancestors became deities upon passing.
Archaeological evidence reveals the importance of burial customs and other practices surrounding death in past societies. Caves in particular were considered “access points” for connecting with ancestors, and archaeologists have theorized that cave burials, compared to burials in residential tombs, represented “reverential interments or sacrificial deaths,” the researchers explained.
Letting the genes speak
But as the researchers themselves wrote in the paper, archaeological interpretations are “largely dependent on context.” That is, without genetic data, it’s difficult to infer how and why certain human remains were arranged in this way—hence, the latest work.
“DNA is not a magic bullet, but it’s nice to have an extra data set,” Alexandre Tokovinine, an archaeologist at the University of Alabama who wasn’t involved in the new work, told Science after the SAA presentation.
The team initially screened 487 human tooth and bone samples, generating genome-wide data for the remains. This included 341 samples representing at least 107 individuals from both elite and non-elite Maya tombs in Belize. And again, of this collection, the researchers found 24 of the individuals had skeletal elements scattered across elite tombs and a ritual tooth cache in distant locations.
“With these, we reconstructed three lineages spanning four, six, and eight generations from otherwise disarticulated and comingled remains,” the team explained in the paper. “Even more surprising was how frequently elements from the same individual were recovered from multiple, geographically distant sites.”
Remembering the dead
Given the numerous undiscovered or unsampled sites in nearby regions, the team added it’s likely parts of these individuals live elsewhere—again, literally. According to Science, the team reportedly declined to speak with the media until the paper got peer-reviewed. However, during the SAA presentation, Prufer said the genetic connections across the sites were “far more overlap than expected by chance,” Science reported.
As for the lady buried with (too many) teeth, genetic analysis indicated that the 226 teeth belonged to at least 39 unique individuals. Her head was removed and replaced with an undecorated vessel. Along with high-status grave goods, the burial arrangement may be a recreation of an underworld scene from the Maya creation story, the team explained. None of these were from individuals believed to be non-elite members of society. In other words, the practice of having your bones buried in different places seems to have been reserved for those with power.
“Our data suggest an intentional strategy to anchor these lineages simultaneously in elite houses and in a cave transformed into an elaborate underworld funerary setting,” the researchers wrote. “Caves long functioned as thresholds, marking the place of emergence of humans out of the mythic time and space where they were first constituted, and thus became places where the elite communicated with those ancestral forces.”
