Spelunking at Actun Tunichil Muknal

Last weekend I forgot to write about the day-trip that Anna and I had in San Ignacio! After the conference in Belize City I had a weekend to kill before heading to Copan, so I went to visit Anna's project in San Ignacio. While I was there we decided to embark on our first spelunking adventure.

I should apologize now for overusing the word "spelunking", but it's been one of my favorite words ever since I learned what it meant from my Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego computer game in 1992. Anyways, Belize has a wide array of caves, from rock shelters to massive subterranean chambers. The Maya thought that caves were sacred portals to the underworld, and so you tend to find ancient offerings and burials inside them; cave archaeology is huge in Belize. There is a particularly fantastic cave outside of San Ignacio called Actun Tunichil Muknal (or ATM if you don't want to wrap your tongue around that). It has been excavated, but the Institute of Archaeology decided to leave the artifacts in it and develop it for tourism into an in situ museum of sorts. It costs a lot to take a tour ($75US), but you can get $10 knocked off if you're an archaeologist! So we decided it would be worth the money.

Was it ever! First, you hike a couple miles, fording the same river three times, until you get to the mouth of the cave. Here's Anna fording the river (I don't know why it's so blurry!):

And here we are at the mouth of the cave:

From this point I don't have many pictures because we had to literally jump into the pool of water at the mouth of the cave and swim across it to a rock outcrop. From there you hike into the cave, across rock shelves, squeezing through narrow passageways, wading across rivers and swimming through pools of water. Our guide, Ben, was awesome. He's worked with lots of different archaeology projects over the years, so he knows everything about the archaeology of the area. And he knew all about the geology of cave formation, which was interesting to learn about. The journey itself was really most of the fun. When you get to the cavern and you have to scale a couple of steeply tumbled boulders and then remove your shoes. You have to wear socks so you'll walk softly around the artifacts and not damage anything. Or if you're Anna, and you forget to bring socks, you can also go barefoot.

The floor of the cavern is a tiered maze of calcite pools that slopes gently upward towards the back of the cave with numerous clustered offerings of pots. The pots are not just on the floor, but in niches in the walls, on shelves and ledges along the sides of the cavern, and lined up underneath rocky overhangs. Many of the pots have been punctured or smashed entirely to release the spirits called on during rituals. Water runs over the area seasonally so everything is frozen from calcification. The cave was used from 100 - 1000 AD, with the older offering located at the front of the cavern and the more recent at the very back. Caves were thought to be the entrance to the watery underworld, and also the domain of the rain god, Chaak. The offerings increase during the Terminal Classic period (800-1000 AD) when there was a drought. There are also 14 burials laid out among the pots, 7 adults and 7 children under the age of five. You can't really see all 14 burials, since some of then have been severely damaged or not well-preserved, but you can see a few. The idea is that they were all sacrificed to Chaak in hopes of ending periods of drought. I'm always skeptical when people talk about human sacrifice. The Maya used caves and rock shelters to bury people who died from many other causes. Sacrifice may be true in this case, but I always take that with a grain of salt.

Since it was a dark cave, my pictures are only mediocre. These are the best ones; hopefully you can get a feeling for how unique this place is: At the very back of the cavern you climb a slightly off-kilter aluminum ladder and make your way into a small room with the skeleton of a young woman inside it. They call her "The Crystal Maiden" because the calcite that has preserved her sparkles when you shine a light on it. It is pretty spectacular:
They think she was bludgeoned and left for dead. The sacrifice argument makes sense in this case. It is difficult enough to maneuver yourself through the small passages and up the slick rocks - it would virtually impossible to do so carrying a dead body. It makes you think about the nature of the sacrifice; did she walk in to the cave knowing she was to be killed? Did she volunteer? If you're going to talk about ritual killing it's much more interesting to think about the complex circumstances of the sacrificed and the sacrificers instead of the blind, fanatical, Mel Gibson-style blood bath that is usually associated with human sacrifice.

It was such a great adventure, and I was exhausted when we got back to San Ignacio. It was so much fun I'm going to try to figure out a way to do more spelunking during my time here. I know there are plenty of caves to be explored in Toledo, I just have to find a way to get out to them.