The ancient Maya burned their dead rulers to mark a new dynasty

About 1,200 years ago in a Mayan city, the bones of several royal figures were burned and unceremoniously buried in the foundations of a new temple. These recently discovered remains may have marked a violent political shift at a time of upheaval in the Maya world.

“When we started excavating we had no idea what it was,” he says Christina Halperin at the University of Montreal. She and her colleagues made the discovery in 2022 at the Ucanal archaeological site in what is now Guatemala.

The researchers found the deposit mixed with rock beneath a pyramid temple structure. The deposit contained the bones of at least four people as well as thousands of ornamental fragments and beads. The bones of two people and many of the jewelry showed signs of high-temperature burns.

“It was clear that these were not normal remains,” says Halperin. But it was the nosepiece and obsidian eye disks of a funerary mask that made it clear that these were royal individuals. She says it “took forever” to sift these clues from the ashes.

Despite their seemingly high-born origins, the royals' cremated remains were not carefully buried but rather “dumped there,” Halperin says. Radiocarbon dating Examination of the bones and ashes also suggested that at least one individual had died up to a century before the remains were burned, between 773 and 881 AD. This suggests that the bones were exhumed from an earlier burial and then burned.

This point in time corresponds to the rise of a new leader in Ucanal named Papmalil, an outsider who came to power in the midst of a crisis broader dissolution of Maya society. In this context, researchers believe that the deposit may be the product of the so-called “fire entry rite,” a Mayan ritual that dramatically marked the destruction and end of the previous dynasty and the supremacy of the next. “This rite appears to be both an act of worship and an act of destruction,” Halperin says.

Simon Martin at the University of Pennsylvania says the discovery provides vivid physical evidence for the theory that the influence of foreign cultures contributed radical changes in Maya society During this time. “These are the ancestors. These are the ancestors,” he says. “To do something like that is to really destroy all of this.”