The Midnight Terror Cave was discovered in 2006 near Springfield in central Belize. It was the inhabitants of the area who gave it that suggestive name then, just after rescuing a thief who fell inside while fleeing from a crowd.
The criminal had fallen through a hole and was trapped in the middle of a mountain of bones. The find piqued the interest of researchers from California State University, who spent three years studying the area and discovered skeletal remains that include some 10,000 skeletal elements belonging to some 118 people and dating to the Classic Maya Period, between the year 250 and 925 after Christ.
Subsequent analysis in the laboratory revealed what everyone imagined: that such a number of bones could only be the product of human sacrifices dedicated to the rain god Chaak and that the Midnight Terror Cave was one of the largest sacrificial sites in the lands. Mayan lows. What was no longer so common were mysterious blue fibers that archaeologists discovered in some of the teeth inside the cave.
Specialists Amy Chan, James Brady and Linda Scott Cummings have studied the dental calculus of the samples found and consider them to be evidence that the sacrificial victims were gagged before they died, as they explain in an article published in the journal International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
The researchers made this discovery by chance. His goal was to learn the type of diet of people who had been offered to the gods by analyzing dental calculus on the outside of their teeth, a place where minute amounts of ingested material are used to being found.
Among the remains of ancient food, the experts saw small fragments of fibers, some white and others blue. "The color blue was considered special for the ancient Maya: it was used quite often to decorate ritual elements," experts write. Similar fibers have appeared in beverages consumed by the Mayans.
Even so, on this occasion it seems that the remains of the threads did not come through the ingestion of liquids, but rather that they were the product of the bites. The cotton cloth would have been dyed blue for ritual ceremonies and used as a gag to silence victims (including children), the study authors note.
If so, they add, these bandages would have been kept covering the mouth for a considerable time. "Several days or several weeks before death," they point out. Previous work had already suggested that Mayan sacrificial victims were often held captive for periods of time or transported long distances, which could have involved the use of gags for extended periods.
