Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings by Gyles Iannone

Author:Gyles Iannone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2018-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Violent Termination at Cancuen

The most dramatic evidence of the Cancuen termination ritual comes from excavation of the southern palace cistern of the site (figure 7.6). A beautiful plaster-lined red-painted cistern of eight meters by ten meters and over two meters deep was located at the entrance of the royal palace. Fed by the ritual water system of the epicenter (e.g., Barrientos, Demarest, et al. 2006) and by a subterranean spring, it would have been a highly sacred location. Stone steps lead into it, and it might have functioned for ablutions prior to ascending the great staircase and passing the audience chambers to enter the royal palace itself. Excavations of the cistern in 2004 to 2005 recovered an enormous skeletal sample, over 600 bones that had been deposited there at the time of the ritual destruction of the site in about AD 800 (a date confirmed by the artifactual microchronology of Cancuen, texts, ceramic cross-dating, the palace architecture sequence, etc.).

The renowned team of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) conducted the field excavations and analysis of the system. The team normally works for the World Court and the Guatemalan Truth Commission in the difficult study and forensic analysis of war crimes and modern massacres. For a year, it studied this singular termination ritual at Cancuen, in their terms “an ancient war crime.” The forensic team did an osteological study of the sacred cistern at the southern palace and its thirty-one skeletons (identified as the minimal number of individuals); other Cancuen subprojects also did complete artifactual studies and osteological and isotope studies continue (e.g. Quintanilla 2013; Winburn et al. 2014) (figure 7.7).

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