A Living Museum

Yesterday we went to one of the best museums I have seen in a long time....We went to a Mayan cave called Actun Tunichil Muknal. This cave was used as an ancient burial ground over 2000 years ago! The Mayans viewed caves as "portals to the underworld", where they would go to worship their ancestors, make offerings to their gods-in the form of human sacrifices and food and pottery items brought into the caves. In this cave there were 15 human remains, all sacrifices...A few were adults, but most were children. This was such a fascinating tour, in many ways.

First of all- we had to hike, swim, climb, and crawl 1/3 of a mile into this cave to get to the areas where the artifacts were. I mean, it was a challenging thing to do-trying to keep yourself not from falling over in the dark, and trying not to fall into any huge rocks. We wore helmets with headlamps on them, and you had to be sure not to get your head wet as to not kill your light (which would completely suck!). Upon entering the cave, the first thing we did was to swim neck deep across a 15 ft pool (wearing all our clothes and sneakers) to get to the first rock! At least right from there we knew what we were getting into, seeing as there was no time wasted in getting wet and already trying to find footing on hidden underground rocks. It was a bummer we didn't have our cameras with us at some point during the hike, but I definitely would have dropped mine in the water and/or smashed it into a boulder (the guide carried them in a wet bag for us until we got to the artifacts). It would've been a good picture to see us all trouping through this cave. The guide led us through some crazy tight squeezes, up and over little waterfalls in the cave-all while pointing out the beautiful geological formations along the way. There were crazy crystal limestone rocks on the walls, and beautiful stalactites and stalagmites. The cave was huge!!! It is 5km long, and we only went a quarter of the way in!

Second of all, all the Mayan artifacts are undisturbed and were left in this cave just as they were found. It took them 4 years to map the cave, and the archaeologists just took inventory of everything but left all the pottery and human remains in the cave. After climbing up this 6 foot skinny rock, clamboring over a rocky ledge-we were about to see some Mayan artifacts. But first, we had to take our shoes off! We all had to hike through the remaining areas of the caves in just our socks...which was a little rough on the feet! They wanted to keep skin oils off the areas where the artifacts were. Which made some sense, as we were about to see. When we finally got to the chamber where the artifacts were-some were just inches from your feet!! Broken Mayan pots were everywhere...I think the Mayans brought the pots into the caves and then broke them to release its' spirits. We walked along, in and around pottery shard lying all over the cave floors, hearing about why they were brought in, and what it meant to the Mayans. Then we saw the first human skeleton-and its' skull was just lying on the ground a few feet away from us, just as it had been for years and years....After going through so many museums in my life and seeing pottery and plates in a glass case next to little descriptive typed paragraphs, seeing them in so-called "real-life" was so cool! We had to be very careful where we walked, as the artifacts were everywhere. One small misstep to the side and you could crush an ancient Mayan pot (and wouldn't you feel like such as ass?!), but luckily noone in our group did. It was such a cool thing to be somewhere where archaelogists didn't just sweep the place clean of everything and throw it into a museum, but let people see the items in their original actual place and how they were used.

The last thing we did was to climb a ladder up to a 15 ft. ledge and through a couple more narrow caves to see the only complete skeletal remains to be found in a Mayan cave. The remains are of a woman, estimated to be about 18 years old. They call her the "Crystal Maiden"....Check the bottom of the blog for her picture!