The city’s investment in the ball game infrastructure — including the largest court in the ancient Americas — was part of a comprehensive architectural and ritual program that positioned the city as the center of a specific kind of cosmological authority.

Whether the children in the chultún had any direct connection to ball game ritual is not established by the evidence.

But the ball game, the underworld, the Sacred Cenote, and the children’s bones are all part of the same site, the same city, the same ritual world.

The Regional Picture: Other Maya Cenote Findings

The Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá is the most famous but not the only cenote in the Maya world to have yielded evidence of ritual activity.

The pattern of cenote use as ritual deposition sites, including the deposition of human remains, appears across the northern Maya lowlands and provides a broader regional context for interpreting the findings from Chichén Itzá.