Contextualizing Caves within an Animate Maya Landscape: Caves as Living Agents in the Past and Present

Abstract

After groundbreaking work by multiple archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century, caves in the Maya world are currently acknowledged as fundamentally ritual rather than domestic spaces. However, a more nuanced read of the anthropological literature and conversations with Indigenous collaborators in the past and present pushes us to move still farther and see caves not as passive contexts to contain ceremonies directed elsewhere but animate beings with unique identities and personalities in their own right. This article combines archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic documentation of Maya cave use in central Guatemala to build a foundation for examining caves as living beings, with particular attention played to the role they play as active agents in local politics and quotidian life. Through ritual offerings, neighboring residents and travelers maintain tight reciprocal relationships with specific caves and other geographic idiosyncrasies dotting the landscape to ensure the success of multiple important activities and the continued well-being of families and communities.

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Article
Contextualizing Caves within an Animate Maya Landscape:
Caves as Living Agents in the Past and Present
Brent K. S. Woodfill


Citation: Woodfill, Brent K. S.. 2021.
Contextualizing Caves within an
Animate Maya Landscape: Caves as
Living Agents in the Past and Present.
Religions 12: 1109. https://doi.org/
10.3390/rel12121109
Academic Editors: Holley Moyes,
Sonia Machause-López and
Paul Morris
Received: 1 September 2021
Accepted: 13 December 2021
Published: 16 December 2021
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
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Copyright: © 2021 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Department of Sociology, Criminology, and Anthropology, Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC 29733, USA;
woodfillb@winthrop.edu
Abstract:
After groundbreaking work by multiple archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century,
caves in the Maya world are currently acknowledged as fundamentally ritual rather than domestic
spaces. However, a more nuanced read of the anthropological literature and conversations with
Indigenous collaborators in the past and present pushes us to move still farther and see caves
not as passive contexts to contain ceremonies directed elsewhere but animate beings with unique
identities and personalities in their own right. This article combines archaeological, ethnohistoric,
and ethnographic documentation of Maya cave use in central Guatemala to build a foundation for
examining caves as living beings, with particular attention played to the role they play as active agents
in local politics and quotidian life. Through ritual offerings, neighboring residents and travelers
maintain tight reciprocal relationships with specific caves and other geographic idiosyncrasies dotting
the landscape to ensure the success of multiple important activities and the continued well-being of
families and communities.
Keywords: ontology; cave archaeology; Maya; animate landscape; ritual
1. Introduction
After groundbreaking work by multiple archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th cen-
tury (Thompson 1959;Carot 1976,1989;Bonor Villarejo 1987;Bonor Villarejo and Sánchez
1991;Brady 1989;Brady et al. 1997;Awe et al. 2005;Awe and Helmke 2007;Bassie-Sweet
1991,1996;Moyes 2000,2005), the primarily religious, rather than domestic, nature of
Mesoamerican cave use has been firmly established within the Western academy. Today,
caves are often discussed within the literature as the setting for ritual activities—passive
contexts to contain ceremonies directed towards beings who literally or metaphorically
reside within them. For the ancient, historic, and modern Maya, however, there is ample
evidence that caves are understood to be animate beings with unique identities and per-
sonalities in their own right, and they are often the recipient of ritual offerings and the
primary audience of ritual activities.
This article combines archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic documentation
of Maya cave use at the highland–lowland transition in central Guatemala to demonstrate
the central role that caves play as active agents in local politics and quotidian life (Figure S1).
Through ritual offerings, neighboring residents and travelers maintain tight reciprocal
relationships with specific caves and other geographic idiosyncrasies dotting the landscape
to ensure the success of multiple important activities and the continued well-being of
families and communities.
2. Caves as Sacred Space
The “ritual turn” in Maya cave archaeology that began during the latter half of the 20th
century was largely rooted in two specific and often overlapping models for interpreting
caves, “caves as Underworld” and “caves as houses,” broadly defined. Two edited volumes
that came out in the same year have titles that represent each perspective—In the Maw of
Religions 2021,12, 1109. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121109 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions

Religions 2021,12, 1109 2 of 15
the Earth Monster (Brady and Prufer 2005) and Stone Houses and Earth Lords (Prufer and
Brady 2005).
The “caves as Underworld” model (e.g., MacLeod and Puleston 1978;Stone 1995;
Bassie-Sweet 1996;Moyes 2016) draws from the cosmological orientation of the Maya
universe, which is composed of three levels—the Heavens, the Earth, and the Underworld.
Unlike the Judeo-Christian perspective, these are not isolated from each other but are
spaces that multiple beings pass through. As described in the Popol Vuh (Christenson
2003), a colonial-period K’iche’ version of a broader Maya creation myth, the Hero Twins,
their parents and uncle, and various other beings travel between the Earth’s surface and
the Underworld; the sun, moon, and constellations move between the Heavens and the
Underworld depending on the time of day. Humans were created in the Underworld and
birthed from it onto the surface of the Earth at a place called, variously, “Seven Caves”
or “Seven Caves, Seven Canyons” (Miles 1965;Castellón Huerta 2001;Christenson 2003).
Cave entrances are often depicted or referred to as the mouth or vagina of the Earth, whose
bowels or womb are the Underworld itself (Figure S2, e.g., Brady 1989;Bassie-Sweet 1996;
Spenard 2014;Moyes 2016).
Caves represent a very real way for human actors to access the Underworld, following
the paths of gods and ancestors as they descend and emerge. While there, they have
access to the beings who live in the Underworld, often thought to be ancestors, deities, and
various other mythological figures. There has been acknowledgment within the field that
some caves are more important or more broadly recognized as superior entrances to the
Underworld or even identifiable as places mentioned in specific myths (e.g., Dillon 1985,
pp. iii–iv; Bassie-Sweet 2008). Such places draw their importance from multiple factors,
such as proximity to important centers or trade routes or the quality of sensory experience
while within its depths; still, all evidence points to the fact that caves, rock shelters, springs,
nooks, cenotes, and lakes are thought of and can be treated as portals for the Maya.
The second approach, “caves as houses,” is rooted in linguistics as well as iconography
and Indigenous literature, since a common term for cave in multiple Maya languages is
“stone house”—naj tunich in Yukatek, och’och’ pek in Q’eqchi’. It is, thus, logical to think of
them as containers. In this perspective, caves are the homes of beings who exist outside
of the living human realm, typically ancestors and specific deities. The most common
deities thought to live in such “stone houses” are the rain and wind gods, as identified in
mythohistoric texts and ethnographic documents (e.g., Brady 1989;Angulo 1987;Dunning
et al. 2014;Moyes 2016).
Caves are wet, dripping places and it is common to see misty clouds hanging near
their entrances in the morning, suggesting that they, not the sky, are where rain originates.
As noted eloquently by Vogt (1969, p. 387):
I have had a number of interesting conversations in which I have attempted
to convince the Zinancantecos that Lightning does not come out of caves and
go into the sky and that clouds form into the air.
. . .
[During] one of these
arguments,
. . .
we watched the clouds and lightning in a storm in the lowlands
some thousands of feet below us. I finally had to concede that, given the empirical
evidence available to Zinancantecos living in their highland Chiapas terrain, their
explanation does make sense.
In addition, cave entrances are also places that suck in or push out air depending
on the time of day because of the differential temperatures between the external and
subterranean environments, rendering it as logical that they are the ultimate origin of wind
as well, associating them with gods of wind as well as rain.
Iconographically, caves, houses, and other buildings are all depicted in similar ways,
as a roofed space where individuals sit (Figure S3). A corollary of this perspective is that
temple-pyramids are artificial mountain-caves and/or that mountain-caves are used in a
manner analogous to temple-pyramids. This idea was first proposed by Vogt (1964) and
revisited by multiple authors (Coe 1988;Freidel et al. 1993;Bassie-Sweet 1996) before Stuart
(1997) drove the point home by noting that the Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts referred to

Religions 2021,12, 1109 3 of 15
pyramids as “witz” (mountain). More recently, the Cancuen Archaeological Project and its
diaspora has used this idea to explain the lack of pyramids in the extreme southwestern
lowlands where mountain-caves are plentiful (Demarest 2006;Spenard 2006;Woodfill 2010,
2011;Andrieu et al. 2020).
The underlying root of both the “cave as Underworld” and “cave as house” perspec-
tives grows out of the ontological underpinnings of the largely Western scholars who
promote them. I (and most of my colleagues) have tended to see caves as “places,” defined
alternatively as “practiced spaces” and “something people do” (de Certeau 1988, p. 117;
Camus 1955, p. 88; both cited in Basso 1996). As locations where things happen, places
are inert containers for human behavior that only gain meaning through the associations
people create and maintain with them. Places, thus, are often intentionally made by specific
actors and institutions as they negotiate power relations and identity (Kinnard 2014).
A close examination of ethnographic and iconographic evidence surrounding the
ritual use of caves and other “places” in Mesoamerica, however, forces a reconsidera-
tion of how we understand the very nature of caves, hills, and other sacred spaces. Our
Maya collaborators tell us that these geographic features are living persons in a land-
scape teeming with life, and for over 2000 years, Maya artists, like the Late Preclassic
muralist who created the image in Figure S3, have depicted these same features as living
beings (
Freidel et al. 1993;
Wilson 1995;Brady and Ashmore 1999;Adams and Brady 2005;
Bassie-Sweet 2008;Ashmore 2009;Harrison-Buck 2012;Palka 2014;Moyes 2016,n.d.;
Woodfill 2019;Woodfill and Henderson n.d.b). In the early 18th century, Friar Ximénez
(1930, p. 19) wrote:
The priests asked ‘to whom do you offer these sacrifices?’ They responded: ‘to
the very high and uneven mountains and ridges and the dangerous passes and
the crossroads, and to the great rapids of the rivers,’ because they understood
that these lived and multiplied and that from them all of their sustenance came
and the things necessary for human life”
Following the trailblazing work by Oakes (1950, p. 170), Harrison-Buck and Freidel
(2021) forcibly argued in this present journal that both humans and divine beings were
understood to regularly transform into animals and other natural phenomena in addition
to their anthropomorphic countenance, rendering the human/non-human divide obsolete
within Maya ontology. As for the caves-as-houses model, it works precisely because of the
ample ethnographic documentation that houses, just like caves, are not simply containers
for human activity. They were and continue to be ensouled through ceremonies that often
include the ritual caching of objects (e.g., Vogt 1976;Mock 1998), meaning that they were
also considered to be living beings who were also the recipients of offerings and ceremonial
attention. Unfortunately, archaeologists are slow to integrate these data points in any
systemic and inclusive manner. It is past time for us to take these observations to heart
and incorporate them fully into archaeological interpretation, not as metaphor but as the
foundation of a new interpretive framework.
Such a perspective makes clear that for the people who visited them, caves are not
simply inert contexts for ritual activity or metaphorical stand-ins for mythic locations, but
are the actual recipients of the ritual events, living beings who are important in their own
right. While multiple archaeologists have acknowledged this fact, most, myself included,
have not fully appreciated the radical departure from traditional interpretative frameworks
this understanding necessitates, instead sometimes returning in the same work to discussing
caves as passive locations. If we take our Indigenous collaborators seriously, as many
in the new ontological turn in anthropology are calling us to do (Strathern 2004;Dean
2010;Descola 2013;Vivieros de Castro 2014;Bassett 2015;Peterson 2019), we need to
engage seriously with what we are told and build our interpretive models up from their
understandings of the world, not ours. It is my contention that the whole notion of “sacred
places” is an artifact of Mayanist, not Maya, ontology, rooted in our own assumptions about
the nature of the world and what populates it. These assumptions cloud our interpretative
frameworks, rendering the manifestations of other ontologies invisible or channeling us to

Religions 2021,12, 1109 4 of 15
take them as metaphor. What follows is not, as at least one of the reviewers of an earlier
draft of this article has posited, an attack on any particular scholars or their interpretations.
Instead, it is an exploration of the ramifications of the idea of caves as living persons and
what it could mean for archaeological interpretation going forward, building upon and
reframing extant works, both my own and that of my peers and colleagues.
3. Observing Contemporary Rituals
Before delving into an exploration of Maya ritual practice, it is valuable to emphasize
that it has been subject to multiple significant and catastrophic ruptures over the past few
millennia. Such ruptures include the rise and fall of Classic Maya civilization; the Spanish
conquest of the Postclassic states and subsequent genocide and forced migrations of their
citizens; and the further migrations and disenfranchisements stemming from the Liberal
policies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most recently, the civil war in Guatemala
(1960–1996) resulted in the death or disappearance of around 200,000 people, mostly Maya,
and the displacement of an additional 1.5 million (CEH 1999).
Even beyond the trauma that military action wrought upon its largely Indigenous
victims, there were several other factors that exacerbated its effects on Maya knowledge
and ritual practice. Military forces explicitly targeted traditional spiritual leaders while
promoting Evangelism, which was thought to be an effective deterrent of communist sym-
pathies, while the forced migrations and common retreats into “communities in resistence”
in the wilderness were especially hard on the elderly, who were the other primary reposi-
tory of ritual knowledge. After the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the government
officially sanctioned Maya ritual and religion, although some information was permanently
lost. While these caveats do mean that we must be cautious about using ethnographic and
historical evidence uncritically, I echo the argument of Edward F. Fischer for a much more
stable “cultural logics” (Fischer 2001) or “ontological stickiness” (Woodfill 2019)—how
cultures understand the basic organization of the universe and develop strategies to adapt
to it—that can withstand significant political, economic, and social transformations.
During the early 2010s, I had the fortune of working closely with multiple Q’eqchi’
spiritual leaders representing two very different models for recovering the knowledge
lost during the Guatemalan civil war. Both groups of ritual practitioners are rooted in the
traditions and practices they observed and learned about from their elders, but the trauma
of state-sanctioned violence, displacement, surveillance, and death, all of which were
accompanied by pressure to reject the Maya worldview and convert to evangelism, often
resulted in impartial transmission. To fill in the gaps, civil war-period and post-conflict
Maya elders and village leaders have created local networks to discuss memories, dreams,
and cultural logics, while some of their younger and more urban counterparts used ties to
the Pan Maya movement to draw from related groups less affected by the war. Members
of this latter group often refer to themselves as ajq’ij, “daykeepers” in the language of the
neighboring K’iche’.
There are some significant differences between the resulting ritual traditions. The
260 day ritual calendar is central to the daykeepers’ practice, while it was unheard of among
the village ritual specialists until recent interactions inspired them to begin to include it
while planning specific ceremonies. Still, for the purpose of this article, I will simply state
that these differences are largely based on idiosyncratic manifestations of the same deep
ontological foundation.
What is striking about both manifestations of contemporary ritual practice among the
Q’eqchi’ (at least from the perspective of a cave archaeologist) is the central importance of
one type of being, the tzuultaq’a (literally “mountain-valley”). They are personified features
on the landscape, individuals with names, personalities, desires, and relationships who can
appear as caves, springs, mountains, ruined buildings, boulders, and lakes (Wilson 1995;
Adams and Brady 2005;Permanto 2015;Ybarra 2018;Woodfill 2019). It is tzuultaq’as who
are the ultimate owners of the surrounding landscape, and it is necessary to obtain their
permission to plant on, harvest or extract from, travel through, build atop, or live upon

Religions 2021,12, 1109 5 of 15
their territory. While they typically appear as still and silent geographic features, they can
also take on a human form, typically as travelers on a road or in dreams, where they can
make their identities and desires known to the local population.
In order to ask for permission from the local tzuultaq’as, the Q’eqchi’ regularly conduct
a type of ceremony called majejak (literally “sacrifice” or “offering”), some of them quite
extravagant, that involve prayers, petitions, and burnt offerings, often with associated
feasts. In a previous article (Woodfill 2014), I described one such ceremony, conducted by a
Q’eqchi’ ajq’ij associated with the Pan Maya movement in 2012.
A variety of offerings
. . .
, typically including sugar, incense, chocolate, multi-
colored candles, rosemary, alcohol, a chicken, cologne, and cigars, are placed in
a comal (clay pan for cooking tortillas and toasting spices) or, ideally, directly
upon the earth in a slight depression that serves as an altar. These are then burnt,
causing a sort of transubstantiation—the conversion of the offerings to smoke
allows them to be consumed by the supernaturals to whom they are being offered.
Each of the materials offered have all been previously smudged with a chocolate
drink, alcohol, incense smoke, and chicken blood in a separate ceremony called
a wa’atesink (which literally means “feeding”) and prayed over during several
days leading up to the event.
As the sacred flame grows and gains strength, the daykeeper calls out to multiple
tzuultaqas (“hill-valleys”), supernatural owners of specific pieces of land in order
to honor them and ask for their protection. All of the participants in the ceremony
face each of the four cardinal directions in turn, praying and kissing the earth.
As the fire continues to burn, each of the 13 avatars of the 20 nawales (spirits
associated with specific days with specific powers and characteristics) are called
and petitions are made to each one, beginning with the nawal of the present
day. On the day Kan (snake), for example, the 13 avatars of Kan are chanted
in order (Jun [One] Kan, Wiib’ [Two] Kan, etc., up to Oxlaaju’ [Thirteen] Kan).
Prayers specifically dedicated to Kan are then made before moving on to the
13 avatars associated with the following day, Keme’ (Death). Additional offerings
are thrown in when a new nawal is called in order to keep the flame burning and
further ingratiate the spirits to the petitioner.
The flame serves two functions according to the daykeepers—it is a vehicle to
bring the offerings to the spirits and a tool for prognostication and interpretation.
. . .
Once the ritual is over and the flame dies, the daykeeper can see how much of
the offering is left, which also speaks to the rite’s success. An ideal ceremony will
leave nothing but ash and resin, while an offering that is not completely accepted
will still have large chunks of unbroken or unburnt materials.
The setup for the ceremony began when Qawa’ Tomás cut a cross-and-circle shape
through the burnt remains from a previous ceremony with a sharpened stick
(one never uses metal on the altar), first making the cross pattern before carving
a counter-clockwise swirl around it. This same shape was then repeated on
multiple occasions throughout the preparations. The first offering to be deposited
was sugar
. . .
, arranged in a circle-and-cross pattern with each spoke of the cross
aimed towards one of the cardinal directions. Incense balls were placed atop
the sugar in the same pattern, as were the candles and sticks of ocote (resinous
slivers of pine), which were the last objects to be added. Near the conclusion of
the ceremony, Qawa’ Tomás cut the cross into the offering again in order to break
up some of the chunks that had been resistant to burning, and finally each of the
principal participants in the ceremony circled the fire in a clockwise direction
three times, cutting circles through the remains in order to signify the completion
of the ceremony.
The repeated cross-and-circle pattern was intentionally likened to the four cardi-
nal directions and the center throughout the ceremony, both literally through the

Religions 2021,12, 1109 6 of 15
orientation of the cross and the prayers to the cardinal directions, and symboli-
cally, as the candles that were placed in the offering were organized according to
the colors of each direction—white for north, black for west, yellow for south,
red for east, and blue and green for the sky above and earth below the center.
While the inclusion of and focus on nawales, beings who represent the days in the
260 day ritual calendar, stands in contrast to the “village” ceremonies I have participated in,
it is clear here that the geographic features important in all Q’eqchi’ ceremonies are living
persons. This basic cosmological tenet is found throughout the Mesoamerica, with the
most famous Maya example likely being Pascual Abaj (Figure S4), a phallic boulder with a
pronounced mouth on the outskirts of Chichicastenango, Guatemala. Ritual practitioners
come throughout the day to feed him and leave him offerings, and even (last time I checked)
set aside Sunday as a day in which tourists are welcome to climb the hill and observe their
ceremonies. Other well-known examples of non-human persons (among ritual practitioners
and anthropologists, at least) include Cerro Gordo in Teotihuacan, Xukaneb’ mountain on
the outskirts of Coban, and the caves underneath Quen Santo (Figure S5) (Bassie-Sweet
2008;Brady et al. 2009;Robb 2017). Even geographic features not well known as persons
likely are viewed as such. Popocatépetl Volcano, which looms between Mexico City and
Puebla, is conceived by the farmers who live atop him as “Gregorio, a masculine being with
long wavy hair
. . .
. Tradition requires he be venerated with offerings placed in a sacred
cave high on the slopes of the mountain
. . .
in order to secure his favor and benevolence”
(Plunket and Uruñuela 2008, p. 112).
4. Reinterpreting the Archaeological Record
If caves (and mountains, and lakes, and springs, and cenotes, and ruins) are them-
selves the object of ritual adoration and not the context or container for ritual directed
elsewhere, what does that mean for archaeological interpretation? Implications for a variety
of archaeological contexts will be discussed here, with a particular focus on the Northern
Transversal Strip.
4.1. The Focus of Sustained Ritual Practice
Beginning with his dissertation research in Naj Tunich, Brady (1989, pp. 402–6) has
argued for the presence of two distinct ritual spaces within cave contexts. High platforms at
or near cave entrances are often associated with brightly painted, beautifully decorated, and,
fundamentally, “expensive” ceramic vessels which, he argued, was evidence of ceremonies
performed in front of a human audience, often by important ritual specialists or members
of the elite class. Within the dark and restricted cave interior, the ritual assemblage tends
to consist of plain utilitarian wares, indicating that the rituals were small scale (because of
the tight quarters) and of a private nature (since the materials used were humbler).
During my dissertation research in the Candelaria Caves, many of the cave assem-
blages did not fit so easily into this public/private duality. The largest concentrations of
finely decorated ceramics were found scattered throughout the floors of some of the largest
cave entrances, but generally in locations where it would have been difficult for more than
a few people to gather and observe, while many of the high stages were associated with
a smaller interior space, often with significant architectural investment to make the area
invisible to any potential audience members outside or below. As a result, I proposed
(Woodfill 2010, pp. 266–68)
the existence of four general ritual categories, organized on two
axes—more/less visible and more/less elaborate (Figure S6). Briefly, they are as follows.
Spectacle is where more elaborate and more visible ceremonies would have been conducted
by ritual specialists (fundamentally Brady’s “public” category), while the adjacent dark
zone (less elaborate and, since it was an integral part of public ceremonies, still more
“visible”) was for backstage rituals. I argued that the cave interior and other restricted
contexts were divided into locations with elaborate offerings to the non-human persons
who resided within (elaborate, small-scale ritual) and the simple, private ceremonies where

Religions 2021,12, 1109 7 of 15
non-elite individuals such as farmers would leave offerings to meet their responsibilities to
the supernaturals who held the fate of their fields in their hands (simple, small-scale ritual).
From my current vantage point in 2021, this ritual taxonomy is skewed, since it grew
out of my own fundamental assumption about the nature of power, or at least those who
hold it. Specifically, this interpretation was largely rooted in a Marxist cynicism that, for
people who hold power, public ritual is simply another tool to maintain it. The entire
premise of the theater state model for Javanese and Classic Maya kingships (Tambiah 1977;
Demarest 1992) is, in fact, a recognition of the potential for elaborate public ritual displays
to consolidate and maintain power differentials between the practitioner responsible for
lavish expenditure and conspicuous consumption, on the one side, and the audience who
observes these events on the other. In the subsequent section on ritual experience, I will
examine whether it is appropriate to reduce elite ritual simply to a power display without
considering the sincerity of the practitioners’ beliefs, for one can both take advantage of
a system and fundamentally believe in it. But here, I would like to shift the conversation
around to focus on who was understood to be watching the ritual and who was its intended
audience.
In that same 2010 monograph, I did propose that the elaborate, small-scale ceremonies
that involved the destruction of exquisite ceramic wares done in locations far from the
human eye were perhaps evidence of the recognition of a non-human audience, which I
posited was “a deity or other invisible being” (Woodfill 2010, p. 268). The locations for
such rituals were typically almost sensorially overwhelming: “these places—be they
. . .
vast entrances
. . .
or
. . .
rumbling, restricted interior[s]
. . .
—strongly evoke the sense of
the numinous. Water is often not only seen but experienced in these places, where the
rushing current or crashing waterfall creates a steady aural backdrop to any activities there”
(Woodfill 2010, p. 267; see also Bjerck 2012).
If the intended ritual audience was, as I now posit, the cave itself and not the denizens
of the cosmological corners it symbolizes, then it becomes more likely that the sites chosen
to give the offerings to it are the places where its essence can be most strongly felt. The
rushing and dripping water; the cool, sweet breath emanating from the exterior; and the most
dramatic views are not simply “numinous” but archetypal (Woodfill and Henderson 2016;
Peterson 2019). Tzuultaq’as reveal themselves to the Q’eqchi’ in dreams, who then share
their location, name, nature, and desires to their human neighbors, so it makes sense that
the most intense parts of the caves are sought out and identified based on the experiences
and expectations of community members.
Still to this day, important tzuultaq’as who have been forgotten are rediscovered and
reintroduced to regular ritual circuits. Stone (1995), for example, mentions the return of
regular visitors to Naj Tunich since its publication in international media. These rediscover-
ies can be seen in antiquity as well. Two important Early Classic (ca. A.D. 480–550) ritual
locations in the Northern Transversal are found in specific chambers of the Candelaria
Caves and Hun Nal Ye (Woodfill 2014;Woodfill et al. 2012). The former (Figure S7) is a
ringed stone cross pecked into the cave’s bedrock and the latter (Figure S8) is a nook in
the cave wall containing an intricately carved stone coffer. Both are hard to access. The
Candelaria pecked cross is reachable only through swimming several hundred meters
upriver or wandering through multiple cave chambers and a lush garden growing in a
large sinkhole, while the Hun Nal Ye niche with the coffer involves braving multiple climbs,
squeezes, ledges in addition to a waterfall. Both also appear to have been abandoned for at
least a century before becoming important ritual locations again in the Late Classic period
(ca. A.D. 700). There were myriad other potential locations for ritual practitioners to leave
offerings, many of which create as overwhelming a sensory experience. But I argue that
these earlier ritual sites were chosen as the only locations of regularly occurring ritual in
the caves’ interiors during this later time period because of the earlier ritual activity which
indicates that here is where the tzuultaq’a can be best accessed.
Tzuultaq’as are, as argued above, powerful beings among the Q’eqchi’, as are their
equivalents for other Mesoamerican cultures. They are the ultimate owners of the sur-

Religions 2021,12, 1109 8 of 15
rounding landscape with the power of life or death over anyone within their domain,
neighbors and visitors alike. As a result, it would have been imperative for merchants,
rulers, farmers, architects, and all others who depend on the continued beneficence of the
tzuultaq’as to regularly give them offerings that demonstrate their fealty and respect. The
beautiful vessels that were purchased, used, and smashed throughout “private” sections
of the Candelaria Caves as well as the stone coffer from Hun Nal Ye were intended to
impress their recipients as well as any community members who observed their caching
or destruction. As discussed in the following section, the physical and economic costs of
ceremonial offerings were often steep, even when human subjects were not watching.
4.2. Ritual Experience for the Practitioner and Audience
Looking back at my earlier interpretations of ritual contexts, I have drawn a strict
delineation between “elite ritual” and “non-elite ritual” both in terms of the function of
ceremonies performed and the body of theory used to analyze them. For the former, I
again skewed Marxist, focusing on how public elaborate ritual displays were important
tools for naturalizing and maintaining social inequalities between the performers and
their audience. For the latter, in contrast, I drew largely from comparative ethnography
(Malinowski 1925;Gmelch 1971;Nielsen 2001) to focus on the experience of the ritual
practitioner and how ceremonies can relieve anxiety during times of uncertainty, such as
the period before harvest or traveling through unfamiliar terrain.
While such a delineation is useful, it obscures the simple fact that elite and commoner
alike lived within the same ontological system and recognized the importance of placating
the same non-human individuals. Elite ritual was a public engagement with these indi-
viduals, which, of course, served hegemonic ends, but by focusing on that aspect, I failed
to realize that these rituals were sincere undertakings, often with perceived high stakes.
Others have noted previously that the ritual paths taken by elite practitioners through
caves could be grueling, even when hidden from the audience. The most telling example
is one described by Moyes (2020) underneath the city of Las Cuevas in southern Belize,
in which the Maya made multiple modifications in a 335 m ritual circuit behind an elite
public stage to make the journey more uncomfortable. Walls with tiny doorways were built
in three restrictions in addition to three partial blockages and one natural restriction, each
of which would have required an intentionally uncomfortable crawl or squeeze.
Such modifications indicate that the experience of the ritual practitioner was important
to the ritual outcome independent of its observation by a human audience and strongly
suggest the sincerity with which the elite performed their ritual duties. Similar pathways
have been found in the Northern Transversal Strip. In the Cave of Juliq’, for example,
Maya ritual practitioners marked a ritual circuit through the cave’s interior with simple
pictographs, consistently choosing the more difficult option when more than one route was
possible (Figure S9, Woodfill and Henderson 2016).
The paths to the primary ritual focus of Hun Nal Ye and B’omb’il Pek caves are
similarly difficult. For the former (Figure S10), ritual practitioners first have to cross over a
waterfall of 12 m in height (if the water height is sufficiently low enough) or swim across
the pool that feeds into the waterfall while fighting a strong current. Once across, they
climb the vertical cliff face to reach the cave entrance, then climb down into its dark interior
to reach a low-ceilinged room that will completely flood during the rainy season. The ritual
chamber is accessible from there by climbing up another cliff, squeezing through a small
doorway constructed below the ceiling, and crawling down a shallow slope, avoiding
whole vessels left in travertine pools the entire way down. In order to traverse B’omb’il
Pek, a cave adjacent to Juliq’, practitioners must climb into a deep cenote, traverse a large
garden, and climb up a slick, steep slope on its opposite side to find a small hole carved into
the rock wall that is barely big enough to accommodate an adult pelvis. A short distance
into the cave is a second small carved hole which leads to a ledge overlooking a sheer,
deep cliff; the ledge is narrow enough that my head and shoulders hover over the abyss
before my body clears the squeeze. In these examples, as others described above, the sense

Religions 2021,12, 1109 9 of 15
of passing through a dangerous and unfamiliar landscape is amplified through decisions
made in the execution of ritual pathways, emphasizing the sincerity of the practitioners
and the intensity of the experience.
One final indication of the importance of the ritual experience to practitioners, re-
gardless of their social position, is the use of San Juan Cave (Woodfill 2019). This small
cave, consisting of a single, steeply sloping tunnel connecting a high southern entrance
to a lower northern one, is located near the summit of a large, freestanding hill a short
distance south of the Nueve Cerros saltworks. After the abandonment of the city, this hill
became the primary focus of rituals in the area, likely by local or regional salt producers
who continued to exploit the source until well after the Spanish intrusion (see, for example,
Tovilla 1960). At some point around A.D. 1390, the Maya built a high ritual stage visible
from near the lower entrance along with rock art that augmented the experience for both
the audience and the practitioner (Figure S11, Schwab et al. 2012;Schwab 2013;Woodfill
2019). For the audience members, faded images, including humanoid faces, were painted
on the walls and ceiling in a way that framed the stage. For the practitioner, a partial
calendric glyph (7 Ajaw, Figure S11b) and a handprint were painted in the ceiling above
the stage and multiple faces were carved into formations facing it. The art visible to the
practitioner was invisible to the audience members and vice versa, but each would have
served as an important reminder of the supernatural audience that was observing the ritual
and receiving the offerings proffered to them.
4.3. Blocked or Desecrated Caves
Examples abound throughout the Maya world that precontact groups blocked
(Andrews 1970
;Brady et al. 1997;Woodfill 2010,2014;Moyes 2020) or burned (Brady
and Colas 2005;Helmke and Brady 2014) cave features. While many of these actions are
often interpreted (correctly, in my opinion) as acts of aggression to damage rival kingdoms,
if caves were simply metaphorical houses or entrances to a universal Underworld, they
could simply be reopened, cleaned, and reused as ritual space. But they are not.
An examination of ethnographic and ethnohistoric data reveals an understanding
that tzuultaq’as and related beings are not immortal and eternal but can sicken and die
if neglected (Remesal 1932, pp. 266–67; Permanto 2015;Woodfill 2019;Woodfill and
Henderson n.d.a). Demarest et al. (2003) report a particularly dramatic case in which a
cave entrance was literally entombed at Dos Pilas—one in royal style replete with offerings
that was unoccupied other than the small cave entrance at its base. Together, each of
these lines of evidence suggests that the reason for eliminating access to caves or burning
and destroying them was sufficient to kill the tzuultaq’a upon whom the neighboring
community depended, forcing them to abandon these ritual locations and search for other
potential patrons.
Adams and Brady (2005) reports the sheer quantity of artifacts recovered from caves
in the multidisciplinary Petexbatun project—approximately 1/3 of the ceramic sherds (and
15% of the fine wares), nearly half of the chert and hematite, and the majority of worked
shell and bone. Excluding a lavish royal tomb excavated by project members (all of which
were offerings to another important class of non-human person, the living ancestor), a full
fifth of the obsidian and a quarter of the jade was recovered from caves. In the Northern
Transversal, one of the most elaborate caches discovered outside of a major city was found
in a small sealed shaft atop Oxlaju’ Ha’ Mountain by a Q’eqchi’ farmer and spiritual leader
(Figure S12, Woodfill 2018). The cache included a Jaguar God incensario, multiple small
jars, lidded boxes containing obsidian prismatic blades, and small incense burners.
Dredged cenotes and subaquatic investigations throughout the Maya world demon-
strate a similar economic investment in lavish offerings in watery contexts (Mata Amado
1974;Coggins and Shane 1984;Medrano 2015). At Cancuen, the sacred well in front of the
royal palace was the centerpiece of the ritual termination of the city, the central act of which
involved the execution of the entire royal family and the deposition of their bodies and
prized possessions into the pool (Demarest et al. 2016). Watery contexts are even created

Religions 2021,12, 1109 10 of 15
in multiple situations. Terminal Classic circular shrines associated with the wind god
typically contain large quantities of marine shell and speleothems even when built far in
the interior lowlands (Harrison-Buck 2012). Brady (1989) notes that small dams were built
in Naj Tunich to create contexts where offerings were deposited which were abandoned
after the water found an escape.
In each of these cases—subterranean, aquatic, and architectural, the quality and quan-
tity of ritual offerings demonstrate the degree to which human communities depended on
these non-human persons. Since these places/persons are so precious, their destruction as
an act of aggression would have dealt a substantial blow to the livelihood of the communi-
ties who depended on them, and the fact that they were never reopened and reused after
destruction and sealing indicates that the communities treated them as dead and gone.
5. Implications for Archaeological Investigation and Interpretation
This more nuanced understanding of the innate personhood of caves as well as
mountains, lakes, houses, and archaeological sites for the ancient Maya should have at
least two major effects on archaeological interpretation. The most immediate change
is the recognition by cave archaeologists and other technical specialists who work in
challenging geological contexts (e.g., subaquatic and alpine archaeologists) that their
subfield is methodological, not theoretical. While the skill sets and tools needed to traverse,
map, and excavate cave, mountain, and underwater environments will continue to be
highly specialized, the recognition that each of these landforms is simply one kind of
person in a heavily-populated landscape necessitates larger interpretative frameworks that
include an examination of all types of non-human personhood. As a result, landscape
studies must broaden their focus to present unified theoretical fronts instead of the current
disjointed patchwork (see also Brady and Ashmore 1999;Palka 2014;Harrison-Buck and
Freidel 2021).
The second change must be discipline wide. There is a long history in archaeology
of giving lip service to Indigenous “cosmology,” “religion,” “worldview,” or “ontology”
without actually grappling with the implications of said perspectives beyond works that
focus specifically on these topics. Many interpretations within economic archaeology are a
painfully obvious straw man to set up this point—we tend to create models of resource
production and commodity transport using least-cost calculations as if we were unaware
of the ritual obligations to the non-human persons in the Maya landscape, resulting in
gross miscalculations of raw materials, production time, output, and transportation routes
and costs (Woodfill and Henderson n.d.a). But this same critique can be applied to most
every aspect of archaeological interpretation, be it the aforementioned Marxist cynicism
we ascribe to political leaders who perform elaborate public rituals as a way to maintain
entrenched power imbalances between the elite and common classes, studies in energetic
inputs for architectural construction, or the spatial relations between urban centers and
their rural hinterlands.
Fundamentally, the acknowledgement of non-human personhood in the archaeologi-
cal past is necessary, since any relevant and engaged social science should reflect the actual
worldviews and experiences of the people we claim to study instead of imposing our
own assumptions and beliefs upon them. While this endeavor is ultimately impossible—
Geertz (1973, p. 452) argues forcefully that “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts,
themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those
to whom they properly belong”—we can always strive to be better.
6. Conclusions
The recognition of non-human personhood within the natural landscape can and must
be incorporated into the urban landscape as well, of course. The ubiquitous “inauguration
ceremonies” for ensouling houses needs to be taken literally, both in terms of how they
were understood as ways to breathe life into structures humans create, and as significant
expenses for Maya households because of the amount of energy, attention, and resources

Religions 2021,12, 1109 11 of 15
they require. Temple-pyramids (and their smaller-scale “household shrine” siblings) were
not just monuments to the deceased individuals buried within them, but were the physical
manifestation of the beings they became after death, monumental tzuultaq’as who were fed
and adored in the same way as the tzuultaq’as who exist without direct human intervention.
Although he has proven to be ultimately incapable of taking his own advice, enamored
as he is with French social theory, Brazilian ethnographer Vivieros de Castro (2014) argues
that anthropologists must take our informants seriously whenever we conduct research.
Fundamentally, what that means is that we listen to their explanations and work to push
through our own biases and imposed categories so we can better reflect the ontological
foundations of those we strive to understand. While we may never reach the clarity
Geertz laments in the above passage, such an approach will allow us to create models
that would much more closely represent the actual lived experience of the social, political,
and economic realities of the peoples they study. An engagement in this new ontological
turn has the potential to hew closer to actual ancient behavior, cognition, practice, and
problem-solving approaches; flesh out nuanced links between archaeological cultures and
their living descendants; and further embrace the anthropological goal of documenting the
variability of human experience. But in order to do so, archaeologists must reorient their
interpretations and reassess the disciplinary common sense that mutes Maya voices.
Caves (and “sacred places” in general) are one area of inquiry where this has proven to
be hard, since we have to sift through a mountain of our own baggage regarding the nature
of space, the sacred, and personhood. Cave archaeology, subaquatic archaeology, and other
landscape specialties have made vital insights into the nature of the Maya cosmos, ritual
practice, pilgrimage, and political order. Unfortunately, many of these insights are often
overlooked or weakly incorporated into the field’s larger common sense. I believe that
this is because, with several notable exceptions (Brady et al. 1997;Brady and Ashmore
1999;Prufer et al. 2011;Moyes and Prufer 2013;Palka 2014), many of our publications
focus on cave contexts to the exclusion of other types of non-human persons, be they
natural, constructed, hybrid, or reborn after death. We are as guilty as our mainstream
colleagues in reading too narrowly, lingering too long in our own methodological cliques,
and overlooking Maya ontology by staying firmly entrenched in our own Western view
with its discrete geological categories. Such intellectual ruts are hard to overcome, especially
if we continue to ignore other related subfields as we strive to advance our own. In order
for all of the landscape studies to truly move from the margins and begin to lead the way
forward for the field as a whole, we must dismantle our respective subdisciplines and
rebuild them into a single unified front. Let us kill cave archaeology as anything other than
a methodological specialization so that we, along with others in the larger field, can fully
reckon with the nature of caves in an animate landscape teeming with life.
Supplementary Materials:
The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10
.3390/rel12121109/s1, Figure S1: Locations discussed in this article. Map by the author from NASA
base maps. Figure S2: Figurine from El Aragón depicting headless lord sitting atop an earth monster
with a toothed mouth. Photo by the author. Figure S3: Detail of the San Bartolo mural depicting a
deity sitting inside of a living cave. Painting
©
Heather Hurst. Figure S4: Pascual Abaj, a personified
stone on the outskirts of Chichicastenango. Photo by the author. Figure S5: Rock art depicting
different sorts of persons and beings. (a) Frog sculpture from Izapa, (b) humanoid from Quen Santo,
(c) ruler emerging from earth monster from Quirigua. Photos by the author. Figure S6: Proposed
ritual “styles.” Figure by the author. Figure S7: cnd pecked cross. Photo by Matt Oliphant. Figure S8:
hny coffer. Photo by Horacio Martínez. Figure S9: Juliq’ circuit and pictographs. (a) Carlos Efraín
Tox Tiul climbs down a difficult stretch of the ritual circuit, (b–d) pictographs marking the ritual
circuit through Juliq’s northern passage. Photos a, c, and d by the author, photo c by Matt Oliphant.
Figure S10: hny path. Map by Carlos Efraín Tox Tiul. Figure S11: san juan cave. (a) plan map of
the cave, (b–g) rock art and carved faces in the cave. (a–b) by Proyecto Salinas de los Nueve Cerros,
(c–d) by Charlie Savvas, (e–f) by Matt Oliphant. Figure S12: Oxlaju’ Ha’ cache. Drawings by Luis
Fernando Luin.

Religions 2021,12, 1109 12 of 15
Author Contributions:
This is the work of an individual author who is responsible for everything
said here. The author has read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding:
This research received funding from the Alphawood Foundation; the Ahau Foundation;
the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.; the United States Agency for
International Development; and the InHerit Foundation.
Institutional Review Board Statement:
The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the
Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Winthrop University
(IRB19102R, 2018-2021).
Informed Consent Statement:
Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Data Availability Statement:
The data that served as the basis of this publication will be made
available upon request.
Acknowledgments:
The author would like to thank the Instituto de Antropología e Historia, the
Departamento de Monumentos Prehispánicos, and the communities of the Ecorregión Lachua and
the municipalities of Raxruha and Chisec, Alta Verapaz for permission to conduct research. This
work was made possible through the hard work of the members of Proyecto Salinas de los Nueve
Cerros and staff and faculty at Winthrop University, Georgia State University, the University of
Minnesota, the University of Louisiana, Vanderbilt University, the Universidad de San Carlos, and
the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Finally, he’d like to thank Mary Coleman, Megan Leight,
and the editors and peer reviewers of this special edition of Religions for comments and suggestions.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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