Inside Actun Tunichil Muknal, a giant limestone cave in the jungle of western Belize, it has been raining for thousands of years. Water falls lightly from the tips of stalactites into the river flowing through the cave. Beneath this light shower, I wade up the river with University of California, Merced, archaeologist Holley Moyes. She is 5 feet 4 inches tall, and the water reaches up to her chin, leaving a ripple in her wake as she moves deeper into the chamber. In the vast and echoing hall, our headlamp beams are like pinpoints in the pitch-black darkness. Underwater, tiny fish nibble at our legs. A quarter-mile deep in the cave, Moyes hoists herself onto a slippery ledge and leads me into a large chamber. Spread over the ground are hundreds of ancient orange and black ceramic pots, some as large as beach balls. Scattered among them are small obsidian tools, stone figurines and mirrors made of pyrite. We climb a ladder to a small chamber tucked away high above the cave floor. “There she is,” she says, as though greeting an old friend. Her headlamp illuminates a human skeleton lying on its back, its mouth jarred open, its ribs covered in glittering calcite. It is the remains of a 20-year-old woman known as the Crystal Maiden. She was sacrificed by an ancient Maya priest as part of a religious ritual more than 1,000 years ago.
Over the past 50 years, vestiges of religious rituals have turned up in hundreds of caves throughout the land of the ancient Maya, stretching from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula down through El Salvador. Some caves, like Actun Tunichil Muknal, or “Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre,” contain human or animal remains, as well as ceramic pots, musical instruments, jewelry, small sculptures and stingray spines, which were used for bloodletting. Others contain mysterious stone structures: altars, plaster platforms, pathways and monuments. In some caves, every chamber is adorned with this architecture — an extraordinary feat of engineering in absolute darkness.
The offerings are almost all found in the “dark zone” of caves, far beyond the “twilight zone,” which is what speleologists (cave scientists) call the parts of a cave illuminated by diffuse light. The Maya ventured into these deep spaces at great risk — in some cases traveling more than a mile underground, swimming down subterranean rivers, climbing precipitous cliffs or lowering themselves into tight hollows. Archaeologists can only access some of these places with ropes.
Moyes is part of a small, enthusiastic league of cave archaeologists in Mesoamerica who are trying to solve the puzzle of these mysterious underground artifacts. She has spent two decades crawling into jungle-choked caves, scrambling through guano and knocking her helmet against rocky ceilings, all in search of the answer to a single question: What drove the Maya to make offerings in such dark, remote places?
