The accumulation of archaeological evidence over the past several decades has established, beyond reasonable doubt, that human sacrifice was practiced in the Maya world — at Chichén Itzá and at other sites, across multiple periods, and in multiple specific contexts.

The evidence from the Sacred Cenote, from the ball court relief panels, and now from the chultún analyzed in the 2024 study is consistent with this established understanding.

At the same time, the scholarship that has developed around these findings has worked to situate the sacrificial practices within their proper cultural and cosmological context — to understand them not as gratuitous violence or as the defining feature of Maya civilization, but as specific ritual practices embedded in a complex religious system that also produced extraordinary achievements in art, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and literature.

The challenge for contemporary scholars and science communicators is to report the evidence accurately without either minimizing practices that the evidence shows were real or presenting those practices in ways that reduce a rich and complex civilization to its most dramatic and violent elements.