![]() ![]() They were then photographed at 40, 100, 200 and 400-times magnification using a specialised Unitron MS-2BD metallurgical microscope. In all, they recovered 113 blades, either full or partial, and washed them in dilute hydrochloric acid. Previous analyses, some done by the same team, have been forced to classify potential auto-sacrificial blades as “indeterminate”.įor their latest attempt, therefore, the researchers focussed on blades recovered from a well-studied sacred cave complex known as Actun Uayazba Kab, located in the Roaring Creek Valley of the Cayo District in western Belize. Second, the degree of wear imposed on a blade used only on one occasion to slice open a penis is very little indeed. “Blades in caves have been used for a variety of tasks based on microwear analysis, such as scraping, cutting, or sawing plants, skin, meat, bone, shell, and wood.” “Not all obsidian blades were used for bloodletting therefore, differentiating those that were from those that were not is important for understanding the role of these implements in ritual cave contexts,” they write. First, it seems that blades, many of them broken, used for more everyday purposes were also ritually deposited in the same caves. There are, Stemp and colleagues say, two sources of confusion. “After use of the blades in ritual, the Maya men left them in the caves, thus returning them as gifts along with the blood back to the earth or ‘Earth Lords’.”Īlthough, pictorial evidence in caves leaves no doubt that auto-sacrificial bloodletting was undertaken all the way up to the fall of the civilisation around 950 CE, identifying exactly which blades among the large numbers found were used for the purposes has been challenging. “Based on artwork, male rulers would pierce or cut the foreskin or glans of the penis with obsidian blades, stingray spines, and bone shards/needles,” the researchers write. It was also sanctioned, and practised, at the highest levels of Maya society. There is some iconographic evidence, Stemp and colleagues add, that women also indulged in ritual bloodletting, although it was mostly a male business. Sometimes they scarify certain parts of their bodies, at others they pierced their tongues in a slanting direction from side to side and passed bits of straw through the holes with horrible suffering others slit the superfluous part of the virile member leaving it like their ears…” Other times they pierced their cheeks, at others their lower lips. “They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces and they left them in this way as a sign. ![]() Stemp and colleagues deploy a passage written in 1941 by US anthropologist Alfred Tozzer to convey the gist of the practice: Just how this was done is abundantly clear from pictograms found in caves held to be sacred. Obsidian was considered a mineral created by lightning – thus it was a crucial tool for use in rituals designed to appease the gods, and to ask favours from them. Maize, the “first fruit”, was revealed to humanity when lightning struck a stone. The Maya worldview held that caves were portals to other-worldly realms, in which resided supernatural beings that clustered around a central Maize God. Some, however, were held to be sacred, or, at least, used for a sacred purpose. The blades, thin and sharp, were used for a wide variety of purposes, including the expected quotidian ones, such as skinning and scraping and cutting meat. Obsidian, the researchers explain, was an important stone to the Maya, and many thousands of complete or partial blades made from the material have been recovered from archaeological sites throughout central America. It played a major role in determining status and gender roles. As a team led by James Stemp from Keene State College in New Hampshire, US, outline in a recent paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, “auto-sacrificial bloodletting” among the Maya was intimately tied up not only with religion, but also with the relationships between “producers, consumers, practitioners, and observers”. In short, how does one tell if such a blade was used only once, by its owner, to slash or pierce his own penis? Photo-imaging using extremely high magnification is starting to illuminate a critical aspect of economic and religious practice among the ancient Maya civilisation – but the difficulties in analysing the results are considerable.įor researchers who specialise in the Maya – the meso-American society that arose around 1800 BCE and ended about 950 CE – analysing a characteristic and common type of sharp blade fashioned from obsidian carries a particular, and particularly gruesome, challenge. ![]()
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