The Maya understood cenotes not merely as water sources but as entrances to Xibalba — the underworld, the realm of the dead, the domain of the lords of the underworld who feature prominently in Maya cosmology as preserved in texts like the Popol Vuh.

The underground water world was simultaneously a practical resource and a spiritual geography — a place where the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead was thin, where communication with other powers was possible, and where the appropriate placement of offerings could maintain the balance between the human world and the forces that surrounded it.

This understanding of the cenotes as doorways to the underworld is relevant to the story of Hoyo Negro in ways that the scientific literature does not always acknowledge.

The cave system that preserved Naia’s bones for twelve thousand years was not, for the people who lived above it in historical times, simply a geological formation.