‘Midnight Terror Cave’ contains over 10,000 bones from victims sacrificed to rain god

Back in 2006, the 'Midnight Terror Cave' was discovered in Belize and was found to contain around 10,000 bones from victims who were sacrificed.

The cave was discovered when a looter fell in, and his screams of terror lead to rescuers finding him in the middle of the night - hence the name it ended up with.

Screaming for help after falling into a cave isn't very surprising, and it's even less so given that the cave was piled full of bones from people dead for hundreds of years.

An inventory of the bones was able to identify at least 118 individual victims, with children among the dead and researchers coming to the conclusion that the people had been sacrificed.

California State University, Los Angeles

It's thought that the people the bones belonged to were sacrificed in the name of the ancient Mayan rain god Chaac, who used a lightning axe to strike the clouds and make it rain.

Sacrificing people to the gods was thought to nourish them and keep them well-fed, you don't want the god of rain to starve to death and stop hitting the clouds with his lightning axe, do you?

According to the Washington Post, some of the bones found came from people who lived around 200 miles away from the cave, a huge distance for the 9th century civilisation that used the caves for human sacrifice.

Analysis on the bones found in the cave by a team of scientists from California State University found that many of the bodies uncovered in the cave displayed signs of trauma, suggesting they were killed violently.

The evidence paints a grim picture of what happened in 'Midnight Terror Cave', though it raises even more questions about how the ancient Mayan civilisation worked.

Something else researchers have discovered is that the sacrificial victims were likely gagged before being killed, as according to Live Science, strands of blue cotton fibres were found among the teeth of the bodies there.

It was the teeth that told researchers some of the victims had come from as far as 200 miles away and they may have even more secrets to tell given more time to study.

California State University, Los Angeles

Blue was an important colour in Mayan rituals and archaeologists believe the bodies of sacrificial victims were painted with blue dye to denote that they were being killed as a sacrifice to the gods.

Since cotton was very unlikely to have been part of their diets, it's thought that the discovery of fibres on their teeth indicates that they were gagged before being sacrificed.

More study on the bones would be needed to get a clearer picture of what this all might mean, and with around 10,000 bones to sift through there's plenty to be done.

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