Chichén Itzá Sacrificial Burial of Twin Boys from Hero Twin Myth

These “Hero Twins” are two of the most important characters from Ancient Maya mythology, and now we can link their stories to an actual Maya practice of sacrificing boy children, especially twins, in the Classical Maya settlement of Chichén Itzá. The findings appeared this month in the journal _Nature_, co-authored by geneticist Rodrigo Barquera, which describes DNA analysis of the bones of 64 children between three and four years old that had been part of a ritual practice of human sacrifice.

These bones actually had been discovered back in 1967 — lying adjacent to Chichén Itzá’s main pyramid in an underground sinkhole, the children had not all been killed at once, but rather beginning in the 6th-century CE and continuing for hundreds of years after. Bone analyses don’t reflect gender differences until after adolescence, and many historians had guessed that the remains were of young girls, sacrificed as part of a ritual to ensure good fertility.

However, Barquera and the other scientists working on the genomic study discovered that every single one of the 64 individuals was male, and 25% were closely related — brothers, or cousins. Some of them were twins, which has a special importance in Ancient Maya mythology. In artwork like the ceramic shown here, as well as in the _Popol Vuh_ (the single most important written Maya book reflecting pre-colonial beliefs), the hero twin brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque are a pair of resurrected humans who descend into the underworld to avenge their father’s death and defeat the Gods in an iconic ballgame. Indeed, some of the most important Ancient Maya ruins are of ballcourts designed to ritually re-enact these myths.

Barquera’s study perhaps suggests that the boys might have been part of a family tradition of ritual sacrifice. Even the diets of the children were similar, which begs the question whether the boys were bred in specific families over the course of hundreds of years with their future deaths in mind.