The ancient Maya performed cremations for deceased rulers in honor of a new dynasty’s succession

About 1,200 years ago, the bones of several royals were burned in a Mayan city and discarded unceremoniously in the foundations of a new temple. These recently discovered ruins may represent a turbulent period in the Maya world, with violent political changes.

“When we first started excavating, we had no idea what this was,” he says. Christina Halperin at the University of Montreal. She and her colleagues made the discovery in 2022 at the Ucanal ruins in modern-day Guatemala.

Researchers found that beneath the structure of the pyramid temple, sediments were mixed with the rock. The deposit contained the bones of at least four people and thousands of ornamental fragments and beads. The bones of the two people and many of their ornaments showed signs of being burned at high temperatures.

It was clear this was no ordinary body, Halperin said. However, it was the nosepiece and obsidian eyeballs of the burial masks that revealed them as royal individuals. She says it “took forever” to sift these clues from the ashes.

Despite their apparently noble origins, the charred bodies of the royal family were not buried carefully and were “just dumped there,” Halperin said. Radiocarbon dating of the bones and ashes showed that at least one of him had died a century before his remains were burned between 773 and 881 AD. This suggests that the bones were exhumed from a previous burial and then burned.

This timing coincides with the rise of a new Ukanal leader, Papumaril, an outsider who assumed power amid the widespread dissolution of Maya society. In that context, the researchers found that the deposits were linked to the so-called “Burning Ceremony,” a Maya ritual that dramatically marked the destruction and demise of the previous dynasty and the prominence of the next. I think it may be a product. “This ritual seems to be both an act of worship and an act of destruction,” Halperin says.

simon martin Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say the discovery provides vivid physical evidence for the theory that influences from outside cultures contributed to fundamental changes in Maya society during this period. “These are our ancestors. They are our ancestors,” he says. “Doing something like this will ruin everything.”