Two sets of relatives might have been deposited in the same chultún separated by decades.

The kinship connections are not necessarily synchronic — they do not all have to reflect one community’s ritual practice at one moment.

They might reflect patterns that persisted across multiple generations, in which the selection of related children or of twins for this specific ritual context was a practice that continued across the long history of the feature’s use.

Caves, Cenotes, and the Underworld

To understand the significance of the chultún as a ritual space, it helps to understand how subterranean spaces were understood in Classic Maya cosmology and religious practice more broadly.