Spelunking: it’s a funny sounding word which basically means: ‘exploring caves.’ That would make Dr. Jaime Awe a spelunker. He’s made much of his reputation in archaeology exploring caves. But he doesn’t do it just for the sake of exploration, he does it to find archaeological treasures. That’s because caves are a major part of the Mayan schema of life, death and worship. And Awe says there is a world beneath Belize. Yesterday, he took us on a virtual tour of the caves of western Belize.
Dr. Jaime Awe, Director of Archaeology
“In Belize we are blessed, we are fortunate. We have thousands of cave. To the ancient Mayas and to the modern Mayas, caves represent one of the most sacred landscapes. Caves represent the portals, the doorways, the entrances into the Maya underworld. The shot we are looking at gives us a sense of how the Maya divided their universe. To the Maya, just like us, the universe has three levels: you have the heavens, and the Maya heavens it has thirteen layers. The middle layer is earth and that’s where humans live, that’s where the Maya built their big temples, that’s where they have their agricultural fields. And below earth, there is the underworld and that is the domain of the some of the Gods.”
And those landscapes are plentiful in Belize and the secretes they reveal are plentiful.
Dr. Jaime Awe,
“Some of these caves like the one that we see here are very easy to access, anybody can go into them. Some of them also are enormous, in fact in the Chiquibul at Aktun Cabal, this is called the sand chamber, it is very large. You can see some people right there, there, here, another person at the far end.”
And it impressive not only in physical scale, the mysteries and archeological intrigues are also daunting.
Dr. Jaime Awe,
“In some caves for instance, we find paintings of different images. In this case, at a cave call Handprint Cave, we find these handprints painted against the wall and there are several caves in Belize with these kind of handprints. In other caves, or I should say in most caves, we find pottery. In other caves we find a lot of evidence that the Maya conducted human sacrifice. Here in this cave you can see several skulls of people that were sacrificed.
We know that the Maya went into these caves, because in that big chamber we found, this is a piece of a pine torch. The ancient Maya went into these caves using torches, pine torches, and what we have found is that sometimes at every two hundred yards or so, we have found little bundles of pine. They were leaving fuel along the way.
At Barton Creek Cave we also found that they offered humans as sacrifice. There are some skulls from people that could have been decapitated because that was one form of human sacrifice. This is a little finger bone that has been modified. You can see it is like a little eye, like a nose, and like a mouth. That’s the little bone at the end of ones finger. We have pots and inside some of the pots at Barton Creek, we have found the seeds of chili pepper and we have also found corn.”
And of course, the mother of all caves for human sacrifices is Aktun Tunichil Muknal.
Dr. Jaime Awe,
“And then the ultimate offering, the offering of humans and we find, like I said, about fifteen skeletons in Tunichil Muknal. This one is of a male person, about thirty to forty years of age. The teeth have been modified and he was sacrificed inside the main chamber. But he is not the only individual in here. Here you can see several individuals. In fact half the people that we find sacrificed in caves are younger than fifteen, they are children. This child here is only about nine years old. This skull is of another individual, probably between sixteen and seventeen years old. And here, in these two pictures, there are infants, no more than one year old. And one of the most awesome pictures in Aktun Tunichil Muknal is the sacrifice of this young woman, about twenty years of age. She is still laid out there and you can still see her, exactly how we found her.”
Awe was part of the group that was the first to see those sacrificial remains 15 years ago and he still remembers what it was like.
Dr. Jaime Awe,
“This is the important thing: no one, no other archaeologist, no other human has seen these things for about two thousand years. You can’t explain the adrenaline that goes through, you can’t explain how special that moment is, you just have to live it and I still remember going up to that chamber where that young woman was laid out and looking at this for the first time with my headlamp, it was like wow. It is like going back in time and you just wish that the people that you are looking at could talk to you and could tell you what went on.”
And that job has now been left to this archaeologist.
Tomorrow, we’ll have more form awe as he discussed bloodletting rituals in those caves.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift
