What it can do — and what the 2024 study achieved — is transform the factual foundation on which all of these interpretive questions rest.

The sex of the children, the kinship among them, the presence of identical twins, the dietary patterns of related individuals, the genetic continuity with modern Maya communities: these are facts that were established by the genomic analysis with a precision and confidence that traditional methods could not have provided.

All of the interpretive work that scholars will continue to do about the meaning of the chultún, about the ritual practices of Chichén Itzá, and about the cosmological significance of these interments now rests on a more solid factual foundation than it did before.

The Children as People