It was a sacred landscape — a place with spiritual significance that the Maya and their predecessors had recognized and that shaped how they understood their relationship to the water beneath the ground.

Whether the people who knew Naia — the people she belonged to, who may or may not have known about the cave in which she died — had a similar understanding of caves and underground spaces is not recoverable from the evidence.

But the widespread human tendency to associate caves and underground spaces with the sacred, the dead, and the transformation between states of existence is well-documented globally and in the Americas specifically.

The placement of the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, the importance of caves in the spiritual traditions of many Mesoamerican cultures, and the broader pattern of cave use in ceremonial contexts throughout the pre-Columbian period suggest that the relationship between people and the underground landscape of the Yucatán has been meaningful for a very long time.