Scholar Finds Mayans' Buried Highway Through Hell

[Bianca]

                                    Scholar finds Mayans' buried highway through hell






By MARK STEVENSON
The Associated Press
Nov. 9, 2008
TZIBICHEN CENOTE,
Mexico (AP) —

Legend says the afterlife for ancient Mayas was a terrifying obstacle course in which the dead had
to traverse rivers of blood, and chambers full of sharp knives, bats and jaguars.

Now a Mexican archaeologist using long-forgotten testimony from the Spanish Inquisition says a
series of caves he has explored may be the place where the Maya actually tried to depict this high-
way through hell.

The network of underground chambers, roads and temples beneath farmland and jungle on the
Yucatan peninsula suggests the Maya fashioned them to mimic the journey to the underworld,
or Xibalba, described in ancient mythological texts such as the Popol Vuh.

"It was the place of fear, the place of cold, the place of danger, of the abyss," said University
of Yucatan archaeologist Guillermo de Anda.

Searching for the names of sacred sites mentioned by Indian heretics who were put on trial by Inquisition courts, De Anda discovered what appear to be stages of the legendary journey, re-
created in a half-dozen caves south of the Yucatan state capital of Merida.

Archaeologists have long known that the Maya regarded caves as sacred and built structures in
some.

But De Anda's team introduced "an extremely important ingredient" by using historical records to
locate and connect a series of sacred caves, and link them with the concept of the Mayan road
to the afterworld, said archaeologist Bruce Dahlin of Shepherd University, who has studied other
Maya sites in the Yucatan.

The Associated Press followed de Anda and his team into the caves, squeezing through tiny, over-
grown entrances and rappelling down narrow shafts and slippery tree roots.

There, in the stygian darkness, a scene unfolded that was eerily reminiscent of an "Indiana Jones" movie — tottering ancient temple platforms, slippery staircases and tortuous paths that skirted underground lakes littered with Mayan pottery and ancient skulls.

The group explored walled-off sacred chambers that can only be entered by crawling along a floor populated by spiders, scorpions and toads.

To find Xibalba, De Anda spent five years combing the 450-year-old records of the Inquisition trials
the Spaniards held against Indian "heretics" in Mexico.

The Spanish were outraged that the Mayas continued to practice their old religion even after the conquest. So they used the trials to make them reveal the places where they performed their ceremonies.

Time after time, the defendants mentioned the same places — but the recorded names changed
over the centuries or were forgotten.

Armed with clues from trial records, the archaeologists asked locals for caves with similar-sounding names or coordinates that would place them nearby.

The Mayas used the sinkhole caves, known as cenotes, as places of worship and depositories for sacrificed humans. Many cenotes still contain pools that supply villages with water. The best-known
is the broad, circular pool at the ruins of Chichen Itza.

The cenotes De Anda found were drier, better hidden and farther from villages. They seem to have
had a special religious significance because even as the Maya were forced to convert to Christianity, they still traveled long distances to worship there.

Among De Anda's discoveries are a broad, perfectly paved, 100-yard underground road, a submerged temple, walled-off stone rooms and the "confusing crossroads" of the legends.

"There are a number of elements that make us think that this road is a representation of the journey
to Xibalba," De Anda said. "We think it is no coincidence that the road which comes out of the crossroads leads to the west," the direction described as the way to the afterlife.

At the center of one of the underground lakes, De Anda's team found a collapsed and submerged altar with carvings indicating it was dedicated to the gods of death.

In some of the chambers, it is almost impossible to move without slashing one's skin on stalactites and stone formations projecting from the walls and ceilings, leading De Anda to believe they are a representation of the feared "room of knives" described in the Popol Vuh.

Bats are depicted in the ancient texts, and visitors have to duck to avoid swarms of them. There's the "chamber of roasting heat" which indeed leaves visitors soaked in sweat. Cool currents of surface
air penetrating some caves feel almost frigid, just like the legend's "chambers of shaking cold."

While De Anda has not yet encountered a specific "jaguar chamber," jaguar bones have been found in
at least one cave.

Subterranean "roads" interrupted by deep pools of water may signify the rivers of blood and pus.

But why go to the trouble of reproducing hell? "Perhaps it was to demonstrate power," De Anda speculates, or to give the living an idea of the terrors they would meet en route to paradise.

Clifford Brown, a Florida Atlantic University archaeologist who has worked in the region, agrees that
the Mayas saw the cenotes as a portal to the underworld.

"Everybody has heard of the cenote of sacrifice at Chichen Itza, but it's less widely recognized that
it was part of a generalized cenote worship that existed at many sites," Brown said.

"There are a number of sites in the lowlands where there are caves right underneath the principal temples, palaces and pyramids, which are thought to represent a religious 'access mundi,' where you have the pyramid representing the heavens, and the caves representing the underworld underneath."

[Bianca]

               






Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda is aided by two young archeologists as he prepares to dive into an underground lake inside a cenote cave in Tzibichen on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2008.

Archeologists using long-forgotten testimony from the Inquisition trials of Indian heretics in the 1500's have discovered caves in which ancient Mayas built chambers, altars and underground roads that appear to represent the path that departed spirits had to travel after death.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

[Bianca]

                                   

[Bianca]

               






Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda, right, and an assistant look into an underground lake entrance inside a cenote cave in Tzibichen on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2008.

Archeologists using long-forgotten testimony from the Inquisition trials of Indian heretics in the 1500's
have discovered caves in which ancient Mayas built chambers, altars and underground roads that appear
to represent the path that departed spirits had to travel after death.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

[Bianca]

               






Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda prepares to dive in an underground lake in a cenote cave in Tzibichen on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2008.

Archeologists using long-forgotten testimony from the Inquisition trials of Indian heretics in the 1500's
have discovered caves in which ancient Mayas built chambers, altars and underground roads that appear
to represent the path that departed spirits had to travel after death.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

[Bianca]

                   






Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda prepares to lower into a cenote cave in Tzibichen on the
Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2008.

Archeologists using long-forgotten testimony from the Inquisition trials of Indian heretics in the 1500's
have discovered caves in which ancient Mayas built chambers, altars and underground roads that appear
to represent the path that departed spirits had to travel after death.

(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

[Bianca]

                                            Portal to Maya "Hell" Found in Mexico?





Alexis Okeowo
in México City
for National Geographic News
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081110-maya-road-to-hell.html
Updated with video
November 10, 2008

A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been un-
covered on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists announced recently.

The discovery has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the under-
ground complex—or vice versa.

According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific
and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife.

In one of the recently found caves, researchers discovered a nearly 300-foot (90-meter) concrete
road that ends at a column standing in front of a body of water.

"We have this pattern now of finding temples close to the water—or under the water, in this most
recent case," said Guillermo de Anda, lead investigator at the research sites.

"These were probably made as part of a very elaborate ritual," de Anda told National Geographic
News in August. "Everything is related to death, life, and human sacrifice."

Stretching south from southern Mexico, through Guatemala, and into northern Belize, the Maya
culture had its heyday from about A.D. 250 to 900, when the civilization mysteriously collapsed.



(Read about the watery graves of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

[Bianca]

Myth and Reality



Archaeologists excavating the temples and pyramids in the village of Tahtzibichen, in Mérida, the
capital of Yucatán state, said the oldest item they found was a 1,900-year-old vessel. Other un-
covered earthenware and sculptures dated to A.D. 750 to 850.

"There are stones, huge columns, and sculptures of priests in the caves," said de Anda, whose
team has been working on the Yucatán Peninsula for six months.

"There are also human remains and ceramics," he said.

Researchers said the ancient legend—described in part in the sacred book Popul Vuh—tells of a
tortuous journey through oozing blood, bats, and spiders, that souls had to make in order to reach
Xibalba, the underworld.

"Caves are natural portals to other realms, which could have inspired the Mayan myth. They are
related to darkness, to fright, and to monsters," de Anda said, adding that this does not contradict
the theory that the myth inspired the temples.

William Saturno, a Maya expert at Boston University, believes the maze of temples was built after
the story.

"I'm sure the myths came first, and the caves reaffirmed the broad time-and-space myths of the
Mayans," he said.

[Bianca]

               









Underworld Entrances



Saturno said the discovery of the temples underwater indicates the significant effort the Maya
put into creating these portals.

In addition to plunging deep into the forest to reach the cave openings, Maya builders would have
had to hold their breath and dive underwater to build some of the shrines and pyramids.

Other Maya underworld entrances have been discovered in jungles and aboveground caves in
northern Guatemala Belize.

"They believed in a reality with many layers," Saturno said of the Maya. "The portal between life
and where the dead go was important to them."