L.I.S.A.: Some rituals have already taken place in connection with your project work. Can you give examples of death related rituals and also explain why it is important to include them in your work? Are there challenges that you are facing in the sense of bringing together scientific work with otherworldy values that are related to a sensitive topic such as death?
Matute Rodriguez: Learning about and including ceremonies for the dead has been an exercise of selfexploration and respect towards the people that we are studying and relating to. We don’t know how these specific people thought or what they believed in, if anything at all, but the immaterial connection through ritual is humbling. It hopefully also helps us include more of the human value in the work we are doing. And that is one of the challenges! Before we started our work on the human remains, we invited an ajk’ik (counter of time-spiritual leader) to perform a Maya ceremony to invoke the presence of the ancestors, asking for permission to learn more about them. We have also participated in rituals of one year commemoration of a passed ancestor, and one of the many rituals around the Day of the Dead. These rituals start during the 31st of October, visiting and decorating tombs at the cemetery, as well as the arranging of the sacred altar at home, which are adorned by “relics” and photographs of already gone relatives and loved ones. The relics are all objects placed on the altar, such as fruits, plates with food, glasses with drinks, flowers, incense, trinkets, religious symbols, among others. In this manner the altar is ready to receive the Day of the Saints, November 1, and then the Day of the Dead, November 2. The team was fortunate enough to attend the ceremonies on November 3, when the altar is finally dismantled and the dead end their visit to this plane. It started with a “responso” at the Catholic church, where tables with flowers and baskets are set and each family brings a paper with the list of dead ancestors and a prayer is done while depositing one coin for each departed person in the basket. Then, the paper with the names is torn and disposed of. After that, the families return to their home altar, eat and drink together, while other members of the community start visiting one another, to finally start sharing the relics on the altar and dismantling it. It gives a sense of facing funerary memories in community, not only as individuals. These ceremonies are syncretic and obviously modified by time and the style of each family; it motivates curiosity about what other rituals and how they would have happened in the remote past, for there is archaeological evidence of rituals happening for days and even revisiting of tombs. Slowly building a relationship and confidence with people will also give us a chance to invite them to get to know the work we are doing. The perception of archaeology by the general public is also a topic of interest. Around the sensitive subject of death there will always be challenges; methodological issues such as a balance between scientific investigation and human sensitivity will always arise.