Doctoral Dissertation: Maya Mountains Ritual Caves

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Under the direction of Dr. Don Rice, Mr. Keith Prufer will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Prufer will continue his research as part of an archaeological team conducting excavations in the southern Maya Mountains region of Belize. Work to date has revealed a large number of Mayan sites with house mounds, burials, shrines and other features. What makes this region of particular interest however and forms the core of Mr. Prufer's research is the presence of many caves which are located on cliff faces and are very difficult to reach. Previous work by Mr. Prufer has shown that some served ritual purposes and contain censers, deliberately broken ceramic vessels, human skeletal material and other religious items. Both ethnohistoric and ethnographic data show that Mayan peoples regard caves as supernatural sites and religious ceremonies are still conducted in these contexts. Preliminary archaeological data indicate similarities between ancient and modern practices.With National Science Foundation support Mr. Prufer will conduct a survey to locate additional sites and excavate them. He will analyze the materials thus recovered, particularly botanical remains which have ceremonial significance, within the context of known ethnographic and historic parallels. He will determine the extent of variation among cave assemblages since it is possible that different sites were used for different purposes. During the course of non-cave excavation team members have identified areas within sites which likely served religious purposes. Because remains from many different activities are often intermingled in such situations, Mr. Prufer plans to compare cave and non-cave ritual assemblages both to determine how the latter may best be identified and to learn how ritual relates to spatial context. It is extremely unusual to find Mayan ritual caves and the data Mr. Prufer collects will be of interest to many archaeologists. Better specification of what constitutes a "ritual assemblage" will be useful to Mayanist archaeologists at many sites. This award will also assist in training a promising young scientist.