The Maya communities of the Yucatán have their own relationship to the cenotes and caves of the peninsula — a relationship that, as noted earlier, is not merely geological but profoundly spiritual and historical.

The Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá was a place of offering and prayer.

The cave systems that the Maya used for ceremonial purposes throughout the Classic period and before were part of a cosmology in which the underground world was the realm of powerful beings and significant transformations.

Whether the ancient people of the Yucatán twelve thousand years ago — the people Naia belonged to — had a similar understanding of the underground landscape, we cannot know.

The cosmological systems that later Maya civilization developed over thousands of years of cultural evolution may or may not have roots in beliefs that were present in the founding period.