Mass grave found in Mexico sheds light on how the Maya dealt with people who crossed them

Sep 12, 2013 20:46 GMT  ·  By
Researchers find evidence that the Maya used to decapitate and dismember their enemies
   Researchers find evidence that the Maya used to decapitate and dismember their enemies

A mass grave dating back to some 1,400 years ago has recently been discovered in Mexico by researchers at the University of Bonn's Department of Anthropology of the Americas.

The grave was found inside a 32 square meter (105 square feet) artificial cave at the site of the historical Maya city of Uxul.

Information shared with the public says that it houses the remains of 24 people, all of whom had been decapitated and dismembered before being laid to rest in this location.

Scientists say that, according to evidence at hand, these people must have been war prisoners of the Maya.

It is also possible that they were noblemen from Uxul who crossed the wrong people and who died a very violent death at their hands.

Thus, some of these people appear to have suffered from malnutrition during their lifetime. Others had tooth inserts of jade, which indicates that they used to have a fairly high social status.

“The discovery of the mass grave proves that the dismemberment of prisoners of war and opponents often represented in Maya art was in fact practiced,” Dr. Nikolai Grube argues, as cited by EurekAlert.

Because they have spent the past 1,400 years covered in clay, these human remains are very well preserved.

Hence the fact that, by examining them, the researchers were able to rule out the hypothesis that the limbs and the heads were not in their proper places due to the fact that the bones had been relocated to a secondary burial placed sometime after these people's death.

“Aside from the large number of interred individuals, it already became apparent during the excavation that the skeletons were no longer in their original anatomical articulation. The observed hatchet marks on the cervical vertebra are a clear indication of decapitation,” archaeologist Nicolaus Seefeld explains.

“This observation excluded the possibility that this mass grave was a so-called secondary burial, in which the bones of the deceased are placed at a new location,” he goes on to say.

Of the 24 people buried in this location, scientists were able to identify the age and sex of 15 of them, i.e. 13 men and 2 women between the ages of 18 and 42.