Maya cave sites
caves used by and associated with the Mayan civilization
Mayan cave sites are associated with the Mayan civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Beliefs and observances connected with these cave sites persist among some contemporary Mayan communities. Many of the Mayan caves served religious purposes. For this reason, the artifacts found there, alongside the epigraphic, iconographic, and ethnographic studies, help build the modern-day understanding of the Mayan religion and society.
Study
In works compiled for the fight against idolatry, 16th-century Spanish sources mentioned 17 Maya caves and cenotes - nine of which have been found. In his book Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, friar Diego de Landa described the Sacred Cenote. Underground Maya archaeology began in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Museo Nacional de Antropología leads two projects to study Maya caves: Caves: Register of Prehispanic Cultures Evidence in Puuc Region, 1997, and The cult of the cenotes in the centre of the Yucatan.
In 2008, archaeologists found a Mayan underground complex of 11 temples, 100-metre-long stone roads, and a flooded labyrinth of caves on the Yucatan Peninsula.
The most famous caves are Balankanche, Loltun Cave, Actun Tunichil Muknal, and Jolja'.
“Maya cave sites” enters the record as caves used by and associated with the Mayan civilization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maya, cave and sites can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maya cave sites” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.