The Chichén Itzá study is one of many recent ancient genomics publications that have had to navigate this landscape, and the acknowledgment of community engagement in the published study reflects awareness of those ethical dimensions.

The living Maya communities of the Yucatán Peninsula are not passive recipients of research conducted about their ancestors.

They are active communities with their own relationships to their history, their own interpretive frameworks for understanding ancient Maya civilization, and their own interests in how that civilization is represented in scholarship and in public discourse.

Research that engages with those communities as partners rather than simply as subject matter is more ethically sound and, arguably, more intellectually complete.

What Traditional Archaeology Could Not Have Revealed