Abstract
In the following chapter we discuss the archaeological remains from Cueva del Lazo (Chiapas, Mexico), a ritual precinct that yielded a group of 11 Late-Terminal Classic children’s partially mummified remains. Uncommon and rich contextual information, mainly derived from the exceptional preservation of perishable materials due to the dry climate of the cave, suggests that the interments could be interpreted as postsacrificial deposits or, alternatively, as funerary contexts whose special character could be linked to the specific sociocultural identity of the buried individuals, all of whom are under six years of age. In order to discuss these possibilities, we describe the archaeological context of the cave as well as review the available archaeological and ethnohistorical information on child sacrifices in Mesoamerica, in order to sketch a meaningful framework useful for interpreting the excavated burials.
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Notes
- 1.
The Río La Venta Archaeological project, directed by Thomas A. Lee Whiting and Davide Domenici since 1999, is organized by the La Venta Exploring Team (Italy), the University of Bologna (Italy) and the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas (Mexico). Since 2002, the Project has been partly financed by the Italian Ministero degli Affari Esteri.
- 2.
Interestingly, we found a curious pyramidal textile “bag” or bundle decorated with stylized animals resembling frogs: its shape is very similar to some mat “bags” found by Moser (1975, p. 34) in Ejutla cave, Oaxaca.
- 3.
Often mentioned as the earliest evidence of Mesoamerican child sacrifice is from the Archaic period (ca. 7500–5000 B.C) Burials 2 and 3 from Coxcatlán cave (Puebla), whose skulls—according to MacNeish (1962, pp. 8–9; MacNeish and Fowler 1972, pp. 266–270)—were exchanged after decapitation. Piojan and Mansilla (cited in Urcid 2010, p. 122, n. 5) detected osteological evidence of exposure to fire and defleshing on the bones of Burial 3, although they were unable to identify any trace of decapitation. Nevertheless, Urcid (2010, p. 122, n. 5) challenged the whole interpretation, questioning whether the skulls were exchanged at all and observing that the exposure to fire and subsequent defleshing could have been part of a funerary treatment.
- 4.
- 5.
Child burials in urns deposited in monumental structures—in the same areas where huge amounts of offering caches were deposited —were quite common in the Olmec-related zoquean sites of western Chiapas from Late Preclassic to Early Classic times (Lowe 1962, 1964, 1999; Agrinier 1970, 1975a, b; Lee 1974b; see also Domenici 2010b); often they were interpreted as remains of child sacrifices or “dedicatory burials” related to architectural construction episodes, but in a more recent publication Lowe (1999, pp. 50, 64–65), albeit admitting that possibility, prefers to interpret them as naturally dead children that, due to their young age, were buried in “privileged or sacred places.”
- 6.
Traditionally, they have been interpreted as sacrificed children, but Sugiyama (2010, pp. 103–104), on the basis of the lack of formal cists, recently suggested that these burials are likely of a very late, or even modern, date. Unfortunately, the construction sequence of the outer layer of the pyramid is far from clear and so it is not easy to ascertain if the children could have been deposited between the surfaces of two different sequential structures, even in the absence of formal cists. I would also add that such a regular spatial arrangement of the burials on all the corners of the pyramid would be quite surprising in Colonial or even Modern times.
- 7.
See, for example, the Tohcok jamb, Yaxhá Stela 3 (Houston and Scherer 2010, Fig. 4), and various Late Classic cylindrical vessels such as K1247, K2213, K0928 (Kerr Maya Vase Database); it is interesting to note that in this last case, one of the individuals participating in child sacrifice is holding a musical instrument almost identical to the Aztec ayauhchicahuaztli, also played during child sacrifices during the Atlcahualo festival, as shown by in Sahagun’s Primeros Memoriales (1993, f. 250r).
- 8.
According to Miller, subadult bones were found in the architectural fill of the Caracol, a child’s skull on a plate in the Nunnery complex, two subadult burials in the Osario’s stairway, various subadult remains in the Venus Platform, and a child buried in a cache in front of the Temple of Cenote Xtoloc.
- 9.
Actually, the number and sex of the children is ambiguous: in his Spanish text Sahagún speaks of “boys or girls” and states that “a huge number of children were killed.” Motolinía (chap. VIII, 1996, p. 170)—and Las Casas and Torquemada after him (Las Casas chap. 170, 1992:1166; Torquemada, book VII, chap. XXI, 1986:vol. II, p. 119)—writes about the killing of “a boy and a girl” during the whole festival.
- 10.
It is not clear if Motolinía refers to an underground cist or to a proper stone box. Nonetheless, it is interesting to observe that stone boxes such as the Aztec tepetlacalli often contained offerings for the rain and fertility gods (López Luján and López Austin 2010), a practice apparently also shared by Preclassic and Classic Zapotecs that used pottery boxes for the same purpose (Urcid 2011).
- 11.
- 12.
Motolinía also states that child sacrifice began with a four year drought. The same information is mentioned by Las Casas (chap. 170, 1992, p. 1167) and Torquemada (I, chap. XXI, 1986:vol. II, p. 121); the text of the Anales de Cuauhtitlan also states that the “human paper streamers” sacrifice had its origin during the drought that hit the Toltecs during the year 7 Rabbit (AD 1018) (Bierhorst 1992, pp. 38–39).
- 13.
Durán also mentions the sacrifice of four children (two girls and two boys) on the Iztac Cihuatl mountain, but it is not clear in which month these sacrifices were done (Broda 1971, pp. 281–282).
- 14.
Cervantes de Salazar (I, p. 19; 1971, p. 133) and the Spanish text of Codex Magliabechiano mention sacrifices of children offered to Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca during the preceeding months of Etzalcualiztli and Miccailhuitl but no other author confirms this information. Torquemada (book VII, chap. XXI, 1986:vol. II, p. 119; book X, chap. XVII, 1986:vol. II, p. 267) erroneously refers to Miccailhuitl when describing the drowning of a boy and a girl with their canoe, a sacrifice that other authors attribute to the month of Atemoztli; the picture of Miccailhuitl in the Primeros memoriales shows a figure sitting in a cave with a blue textile turban and paper streamers on the head, apparently an image of the sacrificed adult Tlaloc impersonator left in a cave, as also mentioned in the corresponding text (Codice Matritense fol. 250v; Primeros memoriales 1997, pp. 59, 78).
- 15.
Various authors such as Andrés de Tapia (1988, p. 107), Las Casas (chap. 175, 1992, p. 1182), and Mendieta (II, p. 19; 1980, p. 109) state that the tzoalli dough used in the described ceremonies of the annual cycle was mixed with the blood of sacrificed boys and girls, but the information seems to be quite spurious (Graulich 2005, p. 210 n. 153).
- 16.
Historical sources mention noncyclical child sacrifices at the beginning of a war (López de Gómara 1954, p. 115), or as a gift to Huizilopochtli (Tello 1997, pp. 15–16). In at least one case, a boy was killed by heart extraction to ask Huizilopochtli to divine the outcome of an impending battle ( Relacion de Coatepec y su partido 1985, p. 164; Graulich 2005, pp. 209–210). The Anales de Cuauhtitlan mentions the request of children to be sacrificed as a cause of war between the Mexica and Colhuacan (Bierhorst 1992, p. 54).
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
In a comparative perspective, we can note that in the Andean world children who died before being named were buried in selected places where they were “eaten” by mountain spirits (Harris 1980, p. 75).
- 21.
Interestingly, Houston and Scherer (2010, p. 186) noted that infant and juvenile sacrificial victims accompanying Classic elite burials in the Maya area usually do not show any mark on their bones, suggesting that this absence could indicate a lack of violence, torture, or body violation that the authors relate with the function of the victims as sacred offerings of local origin (opposed to foreign enemies).
- 22.
A couple of other Late Classic interments of children have been identified in the El Ocote region: the scattered and incomplete remains of three different children (one newborn, one between 4 and 12 months old, and one less than six months old; Tiesler and Cucina 2005, p. 29) were uncovered together with the partial remains of a young adult, three ladle censers, and a basalt tenoned jaguar head, in an offering area in Cueva del Camino Infinito; Thomas Lee also identified fragments of a child’s skeleton in Cueva Colmena (Lee 1985, p. 32). While this last case is only cursorily documented, the Camino Infinito deposit also shows characteristics that suggest a nonfunerary, offering-like nature.
- 23.
Their careful burial in an excavated pit, with no sign of violence on their corpses, seems to rule out the possibility of these being the executions of “guilty people” or “witches,” which has been associated with caves in Mesoamerican tradition and specifically with deposition on the surface of cave floors (Lucero and Gibbs 2007); it could be interesting to note here that in the El Ocote area at least two caves have been reported with huge amounts of highly calcified surface deposits of human remains—most of them, if not all, adults.
- 24.
Regarding the association between children and bird bones, see Sahagún’s Codex Florentinus, VI, 31, where the newborn child is described as a wild bird in a nest.
- 25.
See, for example, the funerary imagery on the Berlin Vase where the bundled corpse of a noble is located inside the Flowery Mountain prior his rebirth as a tree, or the interpretation of lip-to-lip cache vessels as representations, both material and glyphical, of the rebirth-related concept of the “white soul flower cache” (Freidel and Guenter 2006, pp. 74, 75, Fig. 3).
- 26.
See Codex Borgia plates 2 and 8, where caves with infixed thorns show the analogy between the cave and the zacatapayolli, the grass ball that, as a symbolic earth, received the bloody thorns used in ritual bloodlettings (Olivier 2006, pp. 414, 420, Figs. 9 and 17).
- 27.
A similar pattern has been observed in Cueva Cheve (Oaxaca), where human skeletal remains were bundled in mats, disposed over a grass layer and covered with a second grass layer (González Licón and Márquez Morfín 1994, p. 232). Durán (II, chap. XIV; 1995, p. 146) states that a sacrifice of prisoners dedicated to the fertility goddess Chicomecóatl was performed in the zacapan (“Place of Grass”), a room whose floor was covered with grass probably imbued with a similar “earthly” symbolism.
- 28.
Immature maize cobs also have been found in Naj Tunich (Brady 1989, p. 86), Alta Verapaz (Sharer and Sedat 1987, p. 248), Gordon’s Cave 3 (Brady 1995, pp. 34, 36), Cueva de las Pinturas (Brady et al. 1997, p. 95), Actun Chechem Ha (Awe et al. 2005, p. 237) and Actun Chapat, where C. Morehart also interpreted the performance of some kind of “first fruit rites” (Morehart 2005, pp. 171, 175).
- 29.
We cannot be sure if the cigars were actually smoked or simply left burning during the ceremony, as sometimes occurs in modern ceremonies. James Brady (personal communication) found a tobacco cigar in Gordon’s Cave 3 at Copán; it is interesting to note that this same cave contained child burials interpreted as the remains of sacrifice (Brady 1995, p. 35).
- 30.
In Maya iconography, the Underworld God N often smokes tobacco and on Tikal Altar 4 he is depicted inside a quatrefoil shaped, cave-like frame that represents the Cauac Monster mouth, while holding (unclear if offering or receiving) a bowl containing a burning cigar (cfr. Scarborough 1998, p. 153, Fig. 9). Among modern rituals making use of tobacco we can mention the Ch’a Cháak rain petition rituals among contemporary Yucatec Maya (Ruz 2009), some Nahua rituals (Sandstrom 2005, p. 44), and the Lacandon Maya cigar offerings left at cave entrances to appease the cave-dwelling aluxes (Bonor Villarejo 1989, p. 35).
- 31.
Cfr. Cline 1944, p. 113 for en ethnographic note linking copal smoke, clouds, and rain among the Lacandon Maya.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge Gabriel D. Wrobel for the meticulous editing of the text that strongly improved its quality, both in content and form, as well as for inviting the author to participate in the session of the 2011 SAA Annual Meeting in Sacramento (CA) where a first version of the paper was presented. Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina not only contributed with their analysis of the discussed skeletal material, but also gave continuous support through discussion and reading a previous version of the paper. The text also beneficiated at various stages of critical readings and suggestions by Giuseppe Orefici, Elvina Pieri, Thomas A. Lee, Nicoletta Maestri, Arianna Campiani, Jim Brady, Guilhem Olivier, John E. Clark, Joyce L. de Jong, and Alan Sandstrom. The late Thomas A. Lee, cherished friend and mentor, must also be acknowledged for introducing the author to the archaeology of the Zoque region and for sharing for many years the direction of the Rio La Venta Archaeological Project. The analysis of the discussed materials has been financially supported by the University of Bologna, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the La Venta Exploring team.
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Domenici, D. (2014). Cueva del Lazo: Child Sacrifice or Special Funerary Treatment? Discussion of a Late Classic Context from the Zoque Region of Western Chiapas (Mexico). In: Wrobel, G. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Space and Place. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0479-2_3
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