The 64 children in the chultún came from families.

They had parents, and those parents had their own parents, and the extended social networks of kinship and community that organized life in and around Chichén Itzá during the Terminal Classic and early Postclassic periods.

The kinship patterns in the chultún provide a partial window into those social networks.

If 25 percent of the individuals had close relatives in the same burial, and if related individuals tended to have similar diets suggesting the same household environment, then at least some of the children came from the same family groups — groups that contributed multiple children to the ritual over the centuries of the chultún’s use, or in some cases possibly in the same episodes of ritual activity.

What were those family groups?