Chultúns served various practical functions, including storage of water or food, and the subterranean chambers that dot the Maya archaeological landscape were built and used for multiple purposes across different periods.

This particular feature appears to have been converted, at some point, into a space for the interment of the children whose remains have been studied.

The broader assemblage from the chultún is estimated to include approximately 106 individuals, based on the skeletal material that has been recovered.

Not all of those individuals were accessible to genomic analysis.

Researchers sampled remains from 64 of them, and from all 64, ancient DNA was successfully recovered — a high success rate that speaks both to the quality of the skeletal preservation and to the sophisticated methods applied to the samples.

The Science of Reading Ancient Bone