The giant underground cave Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal (go to the "Crystal Maiden" cave) in the jungles of western Belize is unique in its own way. To get into this natural structure, you need to overcome an underground river, which has been carrying its waters through the cave for many thousands of years.
UC archaeologist Holly Moyes is studying Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal. Together with a small group of archaeologists, she tries to unravel the mystery of the cave filled with strange "exhibits". Holly spent two decades literally crawling through stuffy underground labyrinths. She tried (and is still trying) to find an answer to one question: what made the ancient Maya make sacrifices in this inaccessible place?
Sacrifice to the bloody gods
Together with members of the archaeological expedition, Holly makes his way into the cave from year to year, moving upstream of the underground river. The woman is 160 centimeters tall and the water reaches her chin. In the huge cave halls, the floor of which in places goes under the water, every sound echoes, and the camping lanterns on the explorers' helmets appear in impenetrable darkness as small luminous dots.
The Crystal Maiden. The remains of a girl sacrificed 1000 years ago
It's a quarter mile. Travelers get out of the water onto the slippery shore and find themselves in a huge room. Hundreds of soccer ball-sized orange and black ceramic pots lie right on the ground. Scattered here and there are miniature obsidian tools, pyrite figurines, and mirrors. A staircase carved in stone leads to another small room.
“She’s here,” Holly says, as if talking about an old friend.
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Her flashlight illuminates the skeleton of a young woman lying on her back. The bones, gleaming in the light of a flashlight, seem to be crystal, that's why this place is called the "Crystal Maiden" cave. This woman was sacrificed to the bloody gods. And it happened over 1000 years ago.
Over the past 50 years, researchers have found evidence of religious sacrifice rituals performed in hundreds of caves in Mayan lands stretching from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to El Salvador. In such caves as Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal, the remains of people and animals were found, as well as huge ceramic pots, musical instruments, precious jewelry, ritual figurines. Many caves have altars. The walls of some caves are decorated with luxurious stone carvings. But the ancient carvers worked in almost complete darkness.
The Maya took great risks, sinking more than a mile underground, crossing underground rivers, climbing steep cliffs, or sinking into bottomless cracks. Even in our time, archaeologists make their way to these places only thanks to special equipment.
The end of the Mayan civilization
The Maya lived in most of Central America. Their sacred center, apparently, was the Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal cave. Between 250 and 950, which archaeologists call the classic period, the jungle was home to magnificent cities. In Copan, south of Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal, 30 thousand people lived. In Tikal, a few hours' drive to the west, there are 100,000 people. And neighboring Karakol was home to as many as 180 thousand people! Maya erected in cities majestic pyramids and steles of gray stone. They watched the starry sky, composed music and wrote books. Their writing system is still considered the most advanced in pre-Columbian America. But the Mayan civilization came to an end. Large cities were abandoned by people and gradually overgrown with forests.
Shards of dishes where the offerings to the gods were placed
Since the middle of the 19th century, archaeologists have been exploring the jungle in search of traces of ancient inhabitants. The very first thing they noticed in the landscape is an abundance of caves with cenotes, natural sinkholes formed by the collapse of the vaults of limestone caves in which underground rivers flow. But these caves did not interest the researchers at first. They mapped cities, great pyramids, detailed descriptions of richly decorated palaces, copied hieroglyphs from steles …
Dive into the river
Everything changed in 1959. Then, not far from the ruins of the now famous city of Chichen Itza, on the Yucatan Peninsula, a cave was found. She was named Balancanche.
There is a dark, very narrow and low tunnel. You need to lie on the ground and crawl about 150 meters to find yourself in the next room, which looks like an antique shop filled with ancient vases. After the discovery of this treasure, archaeologists thought: what other surprises are hidden in the caves?
By 1996, when Holly Moyes, then a PhD student at the Atlantic University of Florida, arrived in Belize to participate in a cave research project, the research was already under way. Holly and the others struggled through the jungle. Having faced the entrance to the "underworld", she realized: to get there, you need to dive into the river flowing from the cave. There is no other way. And Holly dived. And I never regretted it. The mysteries of the ancient Maya fascinated her.
Entrance to the underworld
Under the leadership of the director of the Institute of Archeology in Belize, Jaime Ave Holly began to explore the Mayan caves.
“The Maya were obsessed with caves,” she says. - Each cave, according to their beliefs, was the entrance to the underworld, which they called Xibalba. According to the Maya, the Shi-balba lords afflicted people with diseases.
The ruthless Chuck demanded new human sacrifices
At night at camp, Holly read the Mayan myth of the creation of the world, Popol Vuh, and found a description of Xibalba there. It was about Hunahpu and Xbalanca, twin heroes who traveled to the underworld to fight the evil god Xibalba. Holly was surprised by the controversial Maya attitude towards the other world. Xibalba was considered by them a "place of fear", where monsters with disgusting names - the Demon of Pus and the Flying Scabs - lived. At the same time, the underworld in the Maya myth was associated with life resources. They feared Xibalba, but could not live without her. The rain god Chak lived in these dark caves. He frightened people with peals of thunder and flashing lightning, but they could not live without water falling from the sky …
In 1997, a group of archaeologists led by Jaime Ave, which included Holly Moyes, first examined the Aktun-Tunichil-Muk-nal cave in detail. The work lasted for three months. Every day, Holly dived into an underground river to enter the underworld of the ancients. For long hours underground, she mapped the plans of the cave rooms and carefully examined them in search of traces of the Maya.
“Time stands still underground,” Holly says. - I work from morning until late at night and do not notice it. Jaime has to look for me.
It's not interesting anymore
At the entrance to the Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal cave, archaeologists discovered several pots and whole mountains of snail shells. As they went deeper into the ground, there were more finds, they looked more and more strange. The largest, the central chamber of the cave, located a quarter of a mile from the entrance, looked like a warehouse of ceramic pots and fragments of obsidian, more than a thousand items in total. And there were also 14 human skeletons, counting the "Crystal Maiden". Some huddled in the corners, others lay in the middle. Holly Moyes saw the skeletons of babies in the dark cavernous niches. Scientists took samples of bones and pieces of charcoal from the floor of the cave for subsequent radiocarbon research.
The findings have puzzled archaeologists. Items found closer to the cave entrance date from 250 to the 9th century. And the samples from the main hall belonged to the 8th and 9th centuries. It turns out that for many centuries the Mayans entered the cave, but only in the VIII century they risked entering the dark zone, that is, going deep underground, and gradually these campaigns became permanent for them. Again and again they went into the depths of the cave, performed religious ceremonies there and offered sacrifices. And then, as if by magic, it all stopped. After the 9th century, people seemed to have lost all interest in the cave.
Pleas for Rain and Harvest
On a quiet evening at the end of one field season, Holly Moyes sat at the entrance to Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal. Monkeys were quarreling in the tops of the trees, some birds were shrieking. The river slid from the cave among the mossy boulders in the same way that it carried its waters for millennia. Holly thought that about 1,100 years ago, the Maya suddenly started walking into a cave. Why? And why did they leave the cave just as suddenly?
The 9th century was a turbulent time in Mayan history. The large ancient cities of modern Belize, Guatemala and Honduras began to decline. After six centuries of prosperity, the Mayan lands were suddenly empty. The population in the city of Tikal, in the jungle west of Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal, has decreased from 90,000 to 10,000. Copan's population also declined sharply. The once magnificent cities were deserted, and the jungle began to swallow them.
Sacrifice
Archaeologists call this the collapse of the Mayan civilization and have been debating its cause for decades. Some have argued that the Maya were destroyed by foreign invaders or the destruction of trade routes. Others discussed the possibility of some kind of terrible epidemic or a major civil uprising.
In 2000, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Mayan scientist Jill Richardson completed 17 years of research into the climate of Mesoamerica in antiquity. Richardson studied sediments from the bottom of lakes, tree rings, stalactites and stalagmites in caves and made an unambiguous conclusion: at the beginning of the 9th century AD, there was a sharp decrease in the amount of rain. In his book on the great Mayan drought, Water, Life and Death, the scientist writes that the Maya have always had an uneasy relationship with water. From May to October, it rained heavily every year on their lands, but drought reigned for the remaining six months. To grow crops to feed their vast populations, the Maya used a network of reservoirs, irrigation ditches, and drainage systems that retained rainwater during the wet months. But during the 9th century, precipitation suddenly almost stopped,even during the rainy season.
Richardson describes a terrible picture: the reservoirs were empty, the crops in the fields reclaimed from the jungle were killed. Famine began, millions of people died. The survivors, no longer hoping for anything, went to the ocean coast or lakes in the north.
After reading Jill Richardson's book, Holly wondered if the sacrifices in the caves were related to the drought? She turned to books on the history of Mayan art and in one of them drew attention to photographs of vases. Some of them depicted a deity with huge eyes and an exotic headdress. It was Chak, the Mayan rain god who lived in the underworld. So the Maya believed that the rains originated in the caves.
The same books contained photographs of our contemporaries, the descendants of the ancient Mayans, kneeling in a cave. They held candles and prayed. Today's Maya are Catholics, but they still make pilgrimages to the caves and pray there for rain and a rich harvest.
last try
The next time she made her way down the river to Aktun Tunichil Muknal, Holly imagined herself walking in an ancient Mayan procession. They walked in the dark, lighting the path with torches. On their backs, the pilgrims carried giant ceramic pots and sang prayers. A richly robed priest walked in front, an obsidian knife gleaming at his waist. People looked emaciated. They came to the kingdom of Chaka - Xibalba, following the path of the twin heroes. Everyone was uncomfortable, but they had no other way. A twenty-year-old woman was trailing behind the priest. She was shaking violently. Within minutes, she had to give her life to the ruthless rain god.
The planting season was approaching, but there was not a cloud in the sky. The reservoirs were empty, the soil in the fields was scorched by the sun. Chuck was not happy with the sacrifices they made to him. He was expecting a bloody sacrifice. Finally, the procession reached the central hall, which was littered with previous offerings to the deity. The priest took out a knife …
Their world was falling apart, Moyes thought, and they made one last attempt to please Chuck. She calls the underground rituals a cult of drought.
Since the start of the first field season at Aktun Tunichil Muknal in 17 years, Holly Moyes and her team have explored more than 50 caves located in Belize. And yet archaeologists do not undertake to claim that the cult of drought was widespread. The research area is planned to be expanded to Mexico and Guatemala.
“In some caves, you can almost physically feel the despair of the Maya who tried to save their world from destruction,” says Holly. - Soon we will get to another cave, which is located a few kilometers south of Aktun-Tunichil-Muknal. It is huge - an ocean liner could pass through it. During times of drought, people came here from all over the empire. The first hall ends with a massive stone wall, in which there is a very narrow passage through which you can only crawl. This is one of the gates to Xibalba. My imagination paints a picture of the desperate prayer of thousands of Maya people asking for rain. About the rain that will never fall …
Source: "Secrets of the XX century"
