A few hundred yards north of the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá, a stone causeway leads to a hole in the earth. It is almost perfectly round, about 200 feet across, with sheer limestone walls dropping some 70 feet to green water. The Maya called it the Sacred Cenote. The Spanish called it the Well of Sacrifice.
Bishop Diego de Landa, the same man who burned the Maya books, wrote in the 1560s that the Maya threw living people into this well in times of drought, along with their most precious things, as offerings to the rain god Chaac. For three centuries most scholars treated that as a conquistador’s exaggeration.
Then in 1904 an American named Edward Thompson, who had bought the entire ruined city as a hacienda, set up a dredge on the rim and began hauling up the bottom.
What came up changed everything. Jade carvings. Gold disks worked with images of battle and sacrifice. Copper bells, obsidian blades, wooden idols preserved in the mud, incense, rubber, textiles. And bones. The remains of more than two hundred people, many of them children, some showing marks of violence.
Thompson smuggled much of the gold to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Mexico fought for decades to get it back. Divers returned in the 1960s with better equipment and found more. Nobody has ever reached the bottom of everything that is down there.
The Maya believed cenotes were doorways to Xibalba, the underworld. Some say the gold and jade were gifts to visitors from somewhere else. The Maya would have told you the visitors were gods.
Makes you wonder what it takes to make a people give their best, and their children, to a hole in the ground.
Desperate prayers for rain, or a doorway they believed was answered?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
What do you think about this? The Paiute of Nevada told of red haired giants they trapped in a cave and burned, written down in 1883. In 1911 miners near Lovelock opened a cave and found red haired mummies and a layer of ash. Legend that matched a cave, or memory of real enemies?
What do you think about this? In 1987 a Wisconsin family bought a used bunk bed. Within weeks their kids were sick, a radio changed stations by itself, and a chair rocked with no one in it. They fled in the night in 1988 and burned the bed. Old house, or something that came with it?
What do you think about this? In 1904 an American dredged the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and pulled up gold disks, jade, wooden idols and the bones of more than 200 people, many of them children. The Maya called such wells doorways to the underworld. Prayers for rain, or an open door?
What do you think about this? Norse settlers lived in Greenland for nearly 500 years, with farms, a cathedral and a bishop. The last record is a wedding at Hvalsey church on Sept 16, 1408. Then nothing. The church still stands, roofless and empty. Starved out, or walked away?
What do you think about this? In 1615 a Spanish pearl ship is said to have sailed into an inland sea that then dried up. In 1870 a Los Angeles paper reported its hull found in the desert near the Salton Sea. Every searcher since has lost it to the sand. Mirage, or a galleon in the dunes?
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