Experts believe these were caused in part by sophisticated but ultimately destructive water management techniques and deforestation, and the victims were almost certainly sacrifices to the Mayan rain god Cha’ak.Īfter all, what better gift could you give a hungry god than a human sacrifice on the cob? “The ancient Maya and even the recorded Maya believed humans were made from corn,” Belizean archaeologist Jaime Awe, a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University and Director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project, told Collectors Weekly. Why were they killed? The area at the time – now comprising parts of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize – was suffering devastating droughts. “And because there are so many of them all coming from the same region, then you have to look at whether there was a trade network, essentially a human-trafficking network, in children.” “Were these children taken? Were they sold? Were they voluntarily given up? Were they orphans? There are a lot of different things we need to look into,” she said. “No one’s from Belize,” archaeologist Samantha Lorenz told Collectors Weekly in 2015, “so that means we have this population of children that was brought in from somewhere else for the purpose of sacrifice.” It was a hugely multicultural bloodbath, too, with sacrifices coming from as far as 200 miles away.

With over 9,000 bones in the cave, the remains represent hundreds of individuals, many of whom were just children when they died. Who was sacrificed at the Midnight Terror Cave? While he spent the night recuperating in a Belize hospital, his accidental discovery of one of the largest ever collections of Mayan sacrificial remains was going to change the face of Mesoamerican archaeology forever. He survived – although when he saw where he had landed, he might have wished he hadn’t. One night in 2006, a looter in the Belize countryside fell 18 meters (60 feet) down sheer rock face to what he surely thought was his death.

Well, that explains the “terror” part – what makes it a “midnight” cave? That would be the other half of the nightmare: the discovery of the site.

“It’s probably the largest collection that has ever been found in a Mayan cave.” “We found… a huge collection of human skeleton material, around 9,000 bones,” James Brady, a professor of Mesoamerican anthropology at California State University at Los Angeles, told The Washington Post in 2015. Advertisement What is the Midnight Terror Cave?

Midnight Terrors by Alexandra Lanc