Forgotten in the Maddening Darkness

For over a thousand years, they have lived in darkness, protected in the mountain’s velvety womb. For over a thousand years, they have been safe in this cave, tucked behind curtains of stalactites, hidden in niches like fistulas that pierce the shadows — but not anymore.

There are only five of us, a team of three university students led by a cave exploration expert and a Ph.D. candidate. We’ve been here for weeks now, in a region roiled by violent downpours at night and unrelenting heat by day.

I use my hands to pull myself up the mountain. Every step forward through the mud is half a step back, but we must move quickly. The looters are coming. Someday soon, they’ll haul themselves up this slope, shine their flashlights into the void, and grope for the priceless objects inside. Their fingers will fumble across the fragile edges of ancient Maya artifacts as they stuff them into backpacks. They will leave nothing behind.

Unless we get there first.

~~

In the abyss below, stalagmites grow like a garden of captured souls.

To the Classic Maya who lived between 250 and 900 CE, caves were a thin, penetrable membrane between the dead and the living — the entrance to the underworld of Xibalba. They were natural temples, formations the Maya replicated in their surface-level cities, tucking speleothems (cave formations) like powerful talismans into their stone masonry.

It took decades for archaeologists to realize how important caves had been to those in what is now Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico, western Honduras, and western El Salvador. Even now, their full meaning is still up for debate. There are associations with fertility and sexuality, with lightning and sacrifice. Human remains are found frequently, laid out in full or defleshed and disarticulated before being deposited in the darkness. There is evidence of fire, of rituals in which copal incense would have perfumed the air.

By any measure, this cave in Belize is one of the largest and most culturally complex in the region. Not only did its spiritual leaders and worshipers build a pyramid inside its largest chamber that rivaled any on the surface, they also left multiple offerings. There are pots three feet in diameter with holes punched in their sides to release their spirits. There are whistles and what may have been a music chamber where the stalactites and stalagmites vibrate and echo when drummed. There are scattered mounds of potsherds, and kernels of maize decayed into dust.

In some areas of the Maya world, caves are still used by Indigenous people as sacred spaces. Most of the caves in Belize, though, are nebulous realms whose meaning — but not whose treasures — have been forgotten. The colonial myth that Maya people had “disappeared” from Belize by the time Europeans arrived on its sparkling shores has turned these caves into easy targets for the illegal antiquities trade by Belizeans of every heritage. Because, if there are no true living descendants of the country’s ancient Maya, then their sites and artifacts are up for grabs. 

~~

The looters are coming.

The rains came again last night, a fierce storm that churned up the two-mile trail to the cave’s entrance. We trudge through the steaming, dripping forest, through clouds of mosquitoes dense and ravenous. They peck at my legs, my arms, my face. They drink from my eyelids.

It is a bad day for collecting.

At its mouth, the cave exhales in cool and heaving breaths. I lower my pack and dig for my lights. Once we pass the outer rim of the sun’s reach, the darkness will nestle closely, blinding our sight.

I flip on my headlamp and flashlight, buckle my helmet, and step down, descending along a path of jagged stones like molars. We skirt the travertine edge of a shallow pool, past the chamber where blood-sucking kissing bugs (Triatominae) gather in a Kafkaesque nightmare of antennae and legs. At the first ledge, I plant my hands like a wheeling acrobat, then slide down the other side.

We squat beneath the flowstone’s heavy drapery and step delicately around skeletal remains. They’ve been here so long they are more cave than human, their ribs and femurs fused to the ground. Above them, calcite fingers glitter pearlescent under the light. We pass the forest of burnt speleothems, still sooty more than 40 generations after the fire went out.

The downward slope is perpetually wet, perpetually slick. In the abyss below, stalagmites grow like a garden of captured souls. The cave’s breath, fetid with the ammonia of guano, sweetens as the cavity opens wide — so wide the light fails to find its edges. Ahead of us, hunks of ceiling, fallen over an unfathomable length of geological time, pile up like discarded refrigerators. The Maya moved them here, somehow stacking them in the darkness to build a mountain inside the mountain. We climb the stones, their surfaces slick with bat excrement. The colony hangs above, sleeping off their nocturnal expeditions.

I twist my feet to fit the gaps between the boulders and scramble upward. At their peak is the ceremonial platform of stone where we’ve been amassing the collection of fragile ceramic vessels, stone tools, and figurines. As far as we can tell, our lights are the first they’ve seen in more than a millennium.

~~

A few years later, living in the country’s south, I pass my days in smoke-filled, thatch-roofed homes. I talk to women with shining black hair braided to the waist, and men dressed in T-shirts cast off from the American middle class. There is no electricity or running water. Clothing is scrubbed and pounded on the rocks of a nearby natural pool.

These people are living proof that the Maya are still here. I’m here to try and understand the relationship between contemporary descendants and the local settlements built by the ancient Maya. This village is one of dozens marginalized by the same myth that divorced their residents from their ancestors and left Belize’s unprotected ancient places culturally unmoored.

We pass the forest of burnt speleothems, still sooty more than 40 generations after the fire went out.

More than 80% of the villagers I interview agree: As Maya people, they are the rightful heirs of the places their ancient ancestors left behind.

One elder, a man in his mid-50s who’s held various village leadership positions over the years, tells it to me straight: “The Maya ruin is for the Maya.”

But almost as many, 79%, say that while the ruins are their heritage, they know virtually nothing about their distant ancestors. They have been failed by both oral traditions (severed, in part, by colonial disruption) and the Belizean educational system.

“We have no kind of background with those things,” explains a young subsistence farmer in his 20s, a father of three.

That ancient Maya sites are for the Maya, then, does not mean that those places and Maya artifacts have a spiritual or ancestral significance to the majority of the region’s Indigenous community. They are, instead, a potential economic resource, and not just for the tiny fraction of Belizeans who identify as Maya. Individuals from the population’s majority — people of Creole, Latino, and East Indian descent who, while they may appreciate ancient Maya history, have no ancestral connection to it — are far more likely to participate in the commodification of Maya artifacts and sites both legally and illegally.

“The people feel that the ruins belong to their grandfathers and that means that it should be for them if they want to dig there,” one man says.

I’m told this multiple times in multiple ways.

Often, digging isn’t even necessary. It’s not uncommon for villagers to find a 1,300-year-old object while planting a field or hunting. One day, a girl of 16, one of my closest confidants in the village, proudly shows me a small ceramic pot found by her father in a local cave. She makes jokes about almost everything, her laughter infectious. But about this, she is serious.

“My dad is waiting,” she tells me, for a buyer to return and make good on his promise to pay villagers for Maya artifacts like this one. The extra cash, a tiny fraction of what the object will fetch down the line, is significant. It’s enough for a family whose survival depends on farming corn to break the law.

~~

We won’t take everything — some things are just too heavy to carry. We will take only what is most vulnerable, only what can fit in our packs.

We wrap the pots and figurines in towels and zip them up tight. When the last one is swaddled, we reverse our trail to the cave’s yawning maw. Every step I take, I worry for the thin-walled, charcoal-black olla I carry. At this point in the history of archaeological study, finding an unbroken vessel in the Maya region is rare. Until we get to the field lab, I am its only guardian.

The halo of sunlight that filters through the mouth of the cave is darker and more diffuse than when we arrived. The rain has begun again. The trail was a soggy mess before; now it will be a downhill stream. But there is no turning back.

If we weren’t carrying some of the most precious cultural property in the world, it would be laughable: the pouring rain plastering strands of hair to my forehead, my clothes like dry sponges desperate for a drink. We yell to each other through the pelting sheets to “go slow,” to “be careful.” We offer each other a hand, and hold each other’s packs as we climb over boulders and three-foot-tall tree roots, just in case.

But there is no way to bypass the steep mountainside and the mud that flows down its flank. My feet are untrustworthy — they’ll betray me, I know — so I sit and slide downward on my rear, digging my heels into the earth, grasping at tree limbs, rocks, anything that will slow my inertia.

I’m focused on my progress when a howl rips through the forest. I can see her just up ahead, sprawled across the trail: one of the other students. Her pack is underneath her, the artifacts inside.

“I’m coming!” I shout, scooching faster through the mud to the rhythm of my pounding heart.

When I reach her, I brace myself against a ceiba tree and help her to her feet.

“I’m ok,” she whispers.

Here, in the driving rain, we don’t dare look at the damage that’s been done. Together we slide forward, snakes through the mud. She’s crying, not out of pain but out of frustration, swiping at her tears with fingers caked in dirt. I pretend not to notice.

~~

The sun hasn’t yet set when we reach the field lab. Gingerly, we set our packs like offerings on the table, where we clean delicate fragments with toothbrushes and dental picks. Each pack is unzipped and its contents removed until, finally, there is just one left, caked in an exoskeleton of drying mud.

Steady hands pull out the towel-wrapped vessel and delicately peel layers away. I glance at the student who brought it down the mountain. Her jaw is set, her eyes hard. When the pot is revealed, she winces. What was whole is now three clean shards.

Breaking the pot would have drastically reduced its value in the illegal antiquities market but, archaeologically speaking, nothing of value was lost. The pot can still be analyzed; paleoethnobotanical studies can still be conducted. The artifact still holds a wealth of information about the ancient Maya. We rescued the artifact from a worse fate, one in which only its monetary value would remain. Collecting the cave’s artifacts was our only choice.

But looking at the broken pieces, I’m consumed by nausea. More than the pot is broken.

“The Maya ruin is for the Maya.”

The Belizean Institute of Archeology gave us, a team of students and experts from a U.S. university, the legal right to collect these Maya artifacts. But this, too, is a legacy of colonialism: the right to remove the ancient heritage of cultures to which we have no ancestral connection for “safekeeping” in institutions of the Global North. The subtext is that low-income nations are not sophisticated enough to protect the past; that, without our intervention, future generations will never learn what was.

~~

For two decades, they have lived in darkness, protected in plastic storage bins on the shelves of a university archaeology lab in the U.S. For two decades they have been safe.

The looters were coming. Eventually, they’d have hauled themselves up the slope, shone their flashlights into the void, and groped for the priceless objects in the shadows. They’d have taken them with their fumbling fingers, smothered them in their backpacks. They’d have left nothing behind.

But we got there first. It was us who took them with fumbling fingers, us who smothered them in our own packs, us who shattered something irreplaceable. Now these Maya artifacts are locked unseen and unstudied behind the door of a darkened archaeology lab. And they are not alone.

Around the world — in the U.S., the U.K., the European Union, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere — thousands of artifact assemblages sit untouched in boxes, on shelves, in universities and museums. They can’t be sold, disposed of, or returned to their place of origin — at least not without a protracted legal battle.

In theory, these artifacts wait for future scholars to rediscover the knowledge they possess. In reality — even if they were properly labeled and recorded (which they are not always, despite requirements to do so) — few ever will be.

It was our job to save the past from the present, to carry these precious artifacts into the light. Instead, the darkness silently stalked us down the mountain — a maddening darkness born of colonialism, racial superiority, and academic apathy that the discipline of archaeology has never been able to shake.

We sentenced what was left of the past to an eternity of institutional ambivalence. Like the artifacts, we are still waiting for the light.