Sacred Cenote

The sacred cenote is a sinkhole filled with water, which the Mayans believed to be an entrance to the underworld. It is just north of the main temples in Chichen Itza, a city that was thriving in the 1000s AD. Its people were a curious mix of Toltecs and Itza Maya. You would have to walk 300m down a track from the main temples to reach the sacred cenote. At the cenote, Mayans occasionally made a human sacrifice though much more regularly they threw precious objects in the water. For a long time, people thought that the Mayans drowned the victims because this is what a conquistador wrote.  However, an archaeological study of the all the skeletons showed that they were already killed before going into the cenote. What do you think?

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4 Comments

  1. You are talking about a sacred cenote: a word completely unknown to me. What is a cenote?

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