An osteological collection (of human bones), which make up a total of 920 boxes found during the construction of the Mayan Train, They were transferred to the Shelter Center of the Directorate of Physical Anthropology (DAF), in its new headquarters of the National Coordination of Anthropology, in the San Jerónimo Lídice neighborhood, south of CDMX.
This collection comes from various excavation contexts recorded in the seven sections of the construction of the Mayan Train; An important part of it will require cleaning and consolidation tasks, except for those coming from routes 1 (from Palenque, in Chiapas, to Escárcega, in Campeche) and 2 (from Escárcega to Calkiní, in Campeche), “which are perfectly separated, packaged and ready to be studied in depth”, It is reported on the page of the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico.
“This is the largest human skeletal series, as a whole, that is integrated into the area. For the INAH and for us, in particular, it is a historic moment,” indicates the head of the DAF, Agustín Axel Baños Nocedal, who adds that the arrival of this material inaugurates the second storage center of the directorate, since the first repository, located in the National Museum of Anthropology, houses approximately 11 thousand boxes. , with seven tons of human remains.
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Main discoveries so far
The majority of the bones found in sections 1 and 2 correspond to individual, direct deposits, of the primary type and in an extended position, as well as of the indirect type, since They were found in artificial continents, such as cists, chultunes and inside clay pots. Many were in poor condition and it was practically impossible to observe the biological variables.
In the essay, contained in No. 176 of the magazine Arqueología Mexicana, they state that there is no particular tendency regarding the correspondence towards one sex or another of the analyzed individuals: “In the adult stage, the age range that prevails in the study sample is 21 to 35 years old. In relation to infants, they range from early childhood to adolescence. Regarding height, The estimated size for men ranges from 155 to 166 cm, and in the case of women, from 146 to 152 cm.”
They were observed two types of deformations in the skull, the erect tabular deformation which produces a wide, short and flat head, and oblique tabular deformation, formed by common practices so that the bones grew in an elongated and flattened shape.
On the pathologies they suffered, They mentioned two main ones; osteomyelitis, a bone infection caused by bacteria, mycobacteria or fungi, and periostitis, an injury that usually appears on the inner part of the tibia, in the shin area, common in athletes, such as runners and dancers, both are associated with infectious processes and trauma.
They were also observed nutritional deficiencies that caused disorders of metabolic origin, such as porotic hyperostosis and criba orbitalia, in addition to diseases linked to dental health, although dental filing and the use of inlays on teeth are present in some of the individuals analyzed.
According to the Ministry of Culture, the above is only the initial phase of a titanic task of processing in the office, which will now continue in the DAF, notes Baños Nocedal: “Although we have complete skeletal series from different regions of the country, this can give us a broader overview of the population occupation of the Yucatan Peninsula, in different stages of the pre-Hispanic era.”
“It is a study that will shed light on a range of conditions and unknowns that exist and persist within Mayan studies, for example, the reasons why the framework that supported large cities for centuries was dismantled, and that led to the dispersion of these populations. There are hypotheses, but Knowing the actors, their health-illness conditions, diet, and even whether they have traits of ritual sacrifice, can help us understand the human relationships of that moment, from a broader perspective,” concludes the physical anthropologist.
With this action, the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), undertakes to continue with the registration, cataloguing, conservation and research of this corpus, which It is part of the biological and cultural heritage of the country as it represents direct evidence of the groups that inhabited the southeast and the Yucatan Peninsula before the Spanish invasion.
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