UC Riverside

Chichen Itza was a major hub throughout Mesoamerica and the Maya area around the IX and XII centuries. Incorporating local and foreign practices has led researchers to consider a violent invasion to explain data from the site. Today, researchers (e.g., Braswell and Peniche 2012; Taube et al. 2020) are more in agreement on the Maya origin of the site. More recently, I have been part of a group of collaborators (Stanton et al., in press) who propose that Chichen Itza incorporated an ideological system Teotihucano in origin, transformed during the Epiclassic and the Late/Terminal Classic, and adapted at Chichen Itza. This system was rooted in an idea of Flower World combined with a war cult. Scenes showing this violence associated with this war cult are distributed around the city, and include human bodies as paraphernalia. Yet, the actual information about mortuary practices and osteological materials remains understudied at this site. In this dissertation, I analyze human remains found at Chichen Itza, Yaxuna, and X’togil with three questions in mind: 1) To what extent were changes in mortuary practices articulated with political and/or ideological changes at Chichen Itza and beyond?; 2) What mortuary practices were present at Chichen Itza?; 3) What political strategies are reflected in these mortuary treatments? Using bioarchaeological methods, mainly archaeothanatology and osteobiographical information, I interpret the data from the study of a sample of individuals who died at the mentioned sites. More than 3,485 fragments distributed in 56 deposits were analyzed. An exploratory analysis of the anthropic marks gave us an idea of the body processing that took place in Chichen Itza, some of which suggest a variety of sacrificial practices for public performance and display. The history depicted on walls and panels can make sense in combination with archaeological deposits and further analysis. In this integral and systematic study of the human remains found in Chichen Itza, I am locating them in a bigger perspective, which is needed to understand how the City of the Sun was part of a regional system that originated several practices that would be integrated into the Postclassic Period.