A Maya woman who was buried in a cave in southern Belize sometime between 250 and 400 CE was so revered, according to researchers, that people have been visiting her gravesite for centuries, leaving offerings, and one of the most popular offerings is teeth. 226 human teeth, to be exact.
As detailed in a recent preprint reported on by Science magazine, archaeologists and geneticists analyzed DNA from the remains found in Bats’ub Cave in the mountainous south of Belize. The woman herself had been decapitated post-mortem, her head replaced with a ceramic bowl containing a single jade bead to mimic an underworld creation myth.
Scattered around her spine and pelvis were things you don’t normally see there: a whole lot of teeth. They weren’t hers, thankfully; visiting pilgrims had been leaving them behind as offerings for a couple of centuries.
Hundreds of Human Teeth Found in an Ancient Maya Cave Reveal a Surprising Family Secret
Genetic sequencing found that the teeth belonged to at least 30 to 39 different people, and 24 of those folks were also buried in family tombs for local elites in Muklebal Tzul, a different site about 16 miles away. From what the researchers gathered, ancient Maya elites loved visiting their powerful but very great-grandmother’s cave shrine and leaving behind literal pieces of their dead relatives, or perhaps some of their own teeth that they extracted.
It’s a big archaeological find, but all those teeth and its inherent DNA helped researchers map out a huge, sprawling multigenerational family tree that allowed the researchers to prove that Maya society was patrilineal, meaning that women married into male lines
The DNA data allowed researchers to map out massive, multi-generational family trees, settling a long-standing archaeological debate by proving elite Maya society was strictly patrilineal, “with descent passing through the male line and women joining their husband’s families.”
If you were a powerful noble back then, you inherited the family real estate, and you were almost guaranteed to have a sizable pile of your and your family’s teeth dropped off with a long-dead ancestor.
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