 I would just like to thank the organizers for putting this together because I'm so excited to see what's going on in Europe and what you guys are doing. This is just so wonderful to be at room with a bunch of cave archaeologists. At some point we're going to be acknowledged as cave archaeologists that we are specialists in what we do. And all those people out there who aren't here, they are missing the very best session in the whole thing. So let's feel sorry for them. Okay, so I'm going to assume that none of you are Mesoamericanists and none of you study the ancient Maya. So I'm going to start out with my one minute all-inclusive history of the ancient Maya. So you'll know all you need to know by the end of that. And then I'm going to talk about two caves where I have worked. I was going to do three, the third one is a pilgrimage site that I really wanted to talk about. But I think it's better to start out with kind of the basics today. So I'm at the University of California Merced. I have been working in Belize in ancient Maya caves for the last 25 years. So I've spent a lot of time underground over most of my middle part of my life. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the kinds of caves that we see and also just try to give you some kind of general information about our caves. So this is the Maya area. We're in Central America. So it's hot, it's tropical, it's many compasses, Guatemala, a little bit of Honduras. A very small part of San Salvador, a lot of Yucatán, there's a bunch of caves up there. But most of our caves are either in Belize or Guatemala. So Belize has more caves than anywhere and it's been better researched than anywhere else in Central America. Mainly because we've had so many archaeologists working in Belize. So has anybody ever been there? Has anybody ever worked in? Okay, yeah, this is a tiny country. It's about the size of Florida. It's quite a great place and they're very friendly to archaeologists. So this is a view, I'm working right now in a surface site that has a cave wandering under it. And this is a view from the top of our highest couple of the rainforest. So this is the rainforest area we work in. It's also very karstic. It used to be, it's cretaceous limestone. It used to be underwater. And so some people say we have more surface area under Belize than we have on top. And that may be true because we have a lot of caves. This is a giant cave in Guatemala. So this is sort of what our bigger caves look like, right? So we get these big, kind of magnificent looking caves. This is not to each cave. It's the Matt Nanny. Unfortunately it's in Guatemala, it's not in Belize, but I love this cave. And so just so you know, I mean, I have to differentiate for myself between rock shelters, twilight areas, and dark zones. Because it's really in the dark zones where we see ritual space mostly, right? That people very, very rarely, if ever, live in the dark zone, except under very specific circumstances like during war or there's an ice age where it's so cold that you really can't sleep up. And most of the habitation in caves we see are really in rock shelters. So I think it's really important for us to differentiate. And so the caves I'll be talking about today, I'm going to be talking about dark zone caves. Boom, so the ancient Maya. Okay, so the first thing to know about them is that they are horticulturalists. This is a typical technique throughout, anywhere on the equator, where they do what they call slash and burn farming. And this is the, they grow corn, beans, squash, and this is the subsistence is mostly on corn. All the studies show that Maya people in the past, most of their calories came from corn. So what they do is, this is wet dry season, right? So in dry season they burn off a little piece of the forest, usually only a few hectares. And then they come along right before rainy season with a digging stick, and they plant their corn and beans all in the same hole because the beans can go up the corn, right? Really very, very sustainable. Then something else has to happen before it starts to come up, and they get two to three corn crops a year. Okay, what has to happen after planting? What has to happen for your seeds to come up? Rain, yes, it has to rain. Okay, you guys, how do you make rain? How do you make rain? There's only one way, cloud seeding doesn't work. How else do you make rain? You have to pray for rain, right? So that's when a lot of their agricultural ceremonies happen and they pray for rain. This is a fortunate picture I took of a modern guy in a cave. Pray for rain. And so do we still do this today? Yes, I have tons of pictures from California during our drought. All along the highways, it says, pray for rain. And then when it rains it says, thank you God. So we still do this today, even though we know better, right? So the Asia-wide civilization goes, we start to see people, we have 100 gatherers living in the area and we've been able to date this back further and further all the time, the more stuff we find. However, you know, about 1200 BC is when people really started to settle down and live in villages. Now they wouldn't necessarily have been called Maya. Maya is an archeological term and it just encompasses all of these people we can't talk to who can tell us, oh, I'm this type of Maya or that kind of Maya, right? So this is Maya's civilization, something we essentially made up. And so we see them starting to settle down about 1200 BC. We start to see in beliefs settled villages about that time. And then they grow actually rather rapidly. So by about 400 BC, we have evidence that there may be either chiefs or kings by then. And then they develop a new library of writing systems that we start to tell us about themselves around 250 CE. And then we have the rise of the kingship at that point. And so the Maya was a very high civilization. They lived in city states, usually 10,000 to a million people. So some of them are quite large. They had armies, they had warfare, they had writing. They have all the markings of states. And they build these rather large structures. And so by the late classic period, this was the height of their civilization, probably between 7 and 900 CE is when their populations are the highest. But it's also when things start to fall apart. Because what happens is they stop building buildings about 900, 950, start maybe around 850 in that area. They stop writing. So our last monument is 909 at Tonina, which is in Guatemala. The calendar changes, everything changes. And people, they don't just disappear and die, but the populations do, they lose their population. It becomes very, very low. People move out of this populated area where the rainforests are. They move down towards Yucatan, where there's wells, where you can get water. They move close to rivers. So our big sites in the post-classic period are all close to rivers. But the classic period is essentially pretty much done at least by 1000 CE. And most of them are kind of done around 950. So now let's think about, because this is a time period I'm also most interested in. This time between 700 and 900 CE when things are starting to fall apart. So we call it the classic my-collapse, but what it really is, it's the collapse of the government. It's the collapse of the kingship. Knowledge disappears. All of these things happen to them at this time. And so, of course, we've been working on this for about 150 years now. People have been trying to figure out what happens to these people. And of course, a lot of the paleo-climate records are now showing us that there was a huge drought that started right about 820. And in fact, our paleo-climate records are so good, we can actually look at relative rainfall about every five years. So it's really wonderful. And of course, cave data is showing us that, right? So I'm going to talk about two caves today. This was told to the children all. I did it for my master's thesis. And this one is called, you can call it, this was the one I did for my dissertation. So this is some of my earlier work, but I think it's important because it's very basic about Maya and what we know about caves, right? And how we can think about caves, especially during the late-class period when things were tumultuous, things were falling apart, there's lots of uncertainty, people are probably hungry. There's all of these things happening during this period. So let's start with acting to the children all. As you can see, it's beautiful, by the way. It's a wet cave. There's a river that runs all the way through it. It has this gorgeous entrance. It's really kind of a mountain cave-water-type complex. This is the map that some caveers did many, many years ago. It's a five-kilometer cave. There is early use before the late-class period up around the entrance. And then in the late-class period, they used this area. They called it the Maya level, so we called it the main chamber, right? And so the main chamber, you have to walk through water. You have to swim part of the way. Then you have to crawl up a rock like duck under this little hole. And then after you crawl through the hole, you come out in this huge cathedral-like chamber. And there's actually about five rooms in it. It's really big. It's about 90 meters long. I recorded that chamber back in 1997 and 1998. I have about 1,500 artifacts out of there, most of which are ceramics, but I waste the other things as well. So my goal for my MA was to look at how they were used in this space, which would hopefully tell us of something about what kinds of rituals they were doing. So I was really hoping to look at where they're putting things, and hopefully this would give me hint as to what they were trying to do. Because the Maya have got, they have writing system. We can read it. They hardly say anything about caves. They don't say anything about what they're doing inside them. What we do have is ethnographic analogy, because we have people today who still use them. So what cave archaeologists attended to do is to take ethnographic analogy and splush it onto the archaeological record and say, hey, that's what they're doing. Which, you know, I'm not against ethnographic analogy. I think it's great. And I certainly use it. It helped us to understand that these were ritual spaces. But at the same time, does that mean there haven't been changes over time? So I was really interested to see, like, what they were doing. Well, in my spatial analysis, I looked at things like, you know, rocks, stalactites, you know, pools, where are they putting things? As it turns out, most of the artifacts were placed in these more pools. So these are rimstone dams. And they fill up with water when it rains a lot. So a lot of stuff in the chamber is actually cemented down in calcite. From the constant, you know, while emitting the flowing of the water and leaving this crystalline calcite line. A lot of other things were put under drips. So this is a grinding stone, a quite nice one, by the way. And it's under a drip sitting on a stalagmite. And so when it rains, it fills up with water. So the water features seem to be quite important in this cave. The other thing I found was when I looked at the artifact assemblage itself, the Demolines ceramics, I found that most of the ceramics assemblage were water jars, either really, really big ones or small ones, but lots and lots of water jars in this cave. And so I started to think about, well, you know, what does this mean in terms of the kinds of rituals? Now, there were a number of human sacrifice victims in this cave, which is a little bit unusual. The Maya weren't like the Aztecs. They weren't crazy for sacrifice. You know, caves are the main place where we're seeing human sacrifices, which is really interesting. We also have, we think, some burial caves as well, but the jury's out on that. Even the ones that we think might be burial caves. Normally, they're burial caves, but not in deep caves, especially far back like this. But we think this is a woman. We can't be sure. She's covered in calcite. We'll never take the calcite off. It's one of the top tourist features of Belize, so they're never going to touch her. But based on her pelvic girdle, they think that this is a woman. And as you can see, she was thrown back, so she landed like this. So not a position to bury your locked one in. There's no grave goods with her. And she's placed where? In a pool. Yeah. We have other people as well. We have 16 entire skeletons out of these. 13 of them are actually placed in pools. And all of the infants except for one. So seven out of eight of the infants are all in water as well. And, you know, about half of our assemblage is infants. And so we know from the Aztec that infants are the offering par excellence for rabies. And this is likely to be the truth although we don't have any actual evidence. So let me show you what the crystal maiden looks like when she's covered in water. So this is the rimstone Damley's pool. So as you can see, she's pretty much covered up in water. So I concluded that they are likely to have been doing reign or agricultural rituals in this chamber at this time. And so this is bolstered by my iconography. I'm showing you a couple of examples here because of time, but there's many, many, many. This is a late classic vase that's drawn from the vase and shows this is chocolate ring dot, and you pretty. And he's in a cave. So caves are always shown as these big vases. So this is the mouth, this U-shaped element. And as you can see, there's little teeth. Do you see the teeth? And the teeth are actually stalactites. So if you stand inside a cave, as you all know and look out, often you have stalactites at the drip line, and it looks like they're out with big teeth, right? And that's how the Maya are very literal in their iconography. And so there's Chuck sitting in his cave. This is an actual cave in Guatemala called La Polita. This has been destroyed, but they've got a picture before they ruined it. And this is Chuck's ring dot sitting on a banshee throne inside the mouth of the cave. So essentially, you know, we have these images of reindeers living in caves. So it makes sense that people would do reindeers in caves. Also, we have really good ethnographic evidence from Highland, Guatemala that people still do rituals in caves, especially like first fruit brides, harvest brides. They do something called the cha-cha ceremony, which is a ring ring. That's what that ceremony is. So they do these types of ceremonies today in caves. But I think we have good evidence to say that this is a long tradition. So after that, you look at, well, okay, I have a really good late-class example, right? But what do I have that could be earlier? Have there been changes over time? And I was lucky enough, and this was just a happy accident, because I'm like, my superpower is luck. Because I looked into this site. It's amazing. It had deep subsurface deposits that go down to the Pleistocene. And it's the earliest ritual usage of any Maya cave. So one of the things I did was I excavated this cave. I also ran 42 radial curbing dates, which is a lot to one cave. And I record all of the ceramics and I did all the ceramics so that I could really look at changes over time, both in the use of space, in the ritual assemblage. And I also did a study on use of tenacity, which I'm not going to talk about much today, but I've published on this where I actually looked at the charcoal at each level to see I counted every single lake and my whole big ol' excavation and I could tell when they were using the cave more intensively at some periods than at others. So I did a use of tenacity study as well. And in all three of these categories I found changes, big changes over time, particularly between the early classic and the late classic period. So in the interest of time I'm just going to show you this example of the artifacted assemblage. So one of the things we're getting is in the early classic you notice everything's broken up. And these are all just, you know, this is not a ledge, but the assemblage is all broken up. In the late classic period that's when we start to get these water jars. The same kind of thing I was seeing about two tuna children, these big water jars. And I looked at the iconography and I often hold these big water jars and in fact the moon goddess is thought to hold it large. She sits on the moon and the moon is like her oya and in rainy season it tips over and it dumps water onto the earth. So this also has to do with their mythology and with reindeer deities as well. So not only were they leaving these big sort of partially intact jars, I have to tell you, they didn't hold corn or anything or water, but the bottoms of all of these are, they actually holds in them that you can't see. But like the bottom of all of these is all blown out. So the jar itself is the offering. It's not something that was in the jar. It's the jar. And then when we're seeing these the spatially it's just so different. They're up on these high ledges and they're in the very backs of the cave or they're set up on altars. So they're in these really specific places but often in these really esoteric places as well. So I thought, well, what is this about? Why are they leaving these big jars in the late classic period? What's happening here? So I was also lucky, right, because that's my superpower that they did some wonderful paleoclimate stories of paleoclimate research using speliathems. And so this speliathem is used for this particular research. This is probably the most it's probably the most accurate and well-dated speliathem anywhere. It's amazing. Doug Kennett did this work. Okay, Doug Kennett did this work and as you can see the forest part for droughts, right? And so here's our late classic period right here where the collapse starts. And so about 800 it starts to show that there's a precipitous drop in rainfall. It's not the worst drought they ever had, but you have to remember there's also a high population and they have to maintain a very expensive cane, right? So this was enough we think to have toppled their government and it lasted for quite a long time. And then it would get wet and dry, but then there's this huge drought that really this is 100 years. I mean this is really intense. This was a very, very dry time in my area. So then I started to think well when I looked at my radio carbon days I'm like, wow they fit this exactly. When we see these changes in ritual practice and so I've argued that this is what we call the late classic drought call. And it's happening in caves which should be no surprise to anyone because if there's if there's problems with rainfall caves are the place where you're going to go solve them because you have to use ritual technology to pray for rain. And this is the best place to pray for rain. I also think oh and this is the other thing. So then after my proposal I spent the next 15 years thinking about other caves and one of the things I noticed is that I've been in probably 100 caves in Belize so far and all those I've worked about 28 intensively where we've gone in and photographed and excavated and done radio carbon dates and recorded all the ceramics and done the ceramic chronology so we have really good chronological control on 28 caves. I can say for sure I know when these date to. And of the 28 caves that I've looked at almost half of them only came into use in the late classic period. So not only you know is this a drought call but it's also more extensive. So people are using more caves and they're starting to use more caves during this period than any other time. So what does this mean for humans? Well it means some really interesting things that first of all if you take a kind of Durkheimian Malinowski style approach right or even if you think about social solidarity and costly signaling you know during these really stressful times what are people doing instead of fighting each other right these people are coming together in ritual they're coming together and their religion is uniting them so it's a way to sort of ward off some of the possible stresses one might expect in this kind of stressful situation and so this is the positive part of religion. We hear about the negative religion all the time in today's world but for us this is peace mongering that I'm seeing so I see the ancient Maya as peace mongers not war mongers. Okay and on that note I'd like to thank you for coming I'd like to thank all the people who helped fund me and all the hundreds of people who worked with me over the years who made this all possible and I'm going to give you a present this is a great picture of the Milky Way there you go, thank you