Healing and Health in Ancient Maya Communities

Maya communities lived across southern Mexico and northern Central America, in varied landscapes and political settings. Archaeologists use Preclassic (about 2000 BCE–250 CE), Classic (about 250–900 CE) and Postclassic (about 900–1500 CE) as broad chronological labels. A Late Preclassic plant deposit at Yaxnohcah, Classic-period market and sweatbath remains at Piedras Negras in Guatemala, and a sixteenth-century account of Yucatán each illuminate different forms of care. Spanish conquest unfolded over generations: the Itza capital Nojpetén fell in 1697. Maya peoples continue to live across the region, and present-day studies help identify plant uses while preserving the historical setting of each example.

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Teeth, pain and care in a marketplace

Piedras Negras stood on the east bank of the Usumacinta River in what is now Guatemala. The city was occupied through the Classic period, about 350 to 900 CE, and its Southeast Marketplace saw its most intensive use in the Late Classic, about 620 to 850. Excavations recovered many human teeth among nearly 4,800 fragments of human and animal bone. No burials were found in the marketplace itself, so the teeth were not eroding from nearby graves.

Many of the teeth had extensive caries, or decay that hollows a tooth, and other damage consistent with painful illness. Researchers compared the marketplace sample with teeth from 127 excavated burials at the city. Caries appeared more than three times as often in the marketplace sample; premolars and molars, the teeth most commonly affected, were also overrepresented. Some teeth had fractures made while they were still fresh, including patterns the authors say can accompany removal from a living person; they distinguish these from damage long afterward in the ground or during excavation. Taken together with the disease and tooth distribution, the fractures lead the researchers to interpret the sample as evidence of therapeutic extractions to relieve pain from decay or abscesses, pus-filled infections around tooth roots. The authors argue that dental care took place within the busy Southeast Marketplace, alongside exchange and production.

Maya dental modification was a different practice. Craftspeople filed tooth edges or drilled a small cavity into the front surface of a tooth and set a decorative stone in it. In a study of more than 900 sets of teeth, fewer than four percent of observable inlay cavities reached the pulp chamber, the soft inner part of the tooth. That rate points to careful control of a difficult procedure. Inlaid teeth changed appearance, while the extracted teeth in the marketplace reflect a separate response to severe decay.

Sweatbaths and heat-based care

A Mesoamerican sweatbath was a small, enclosed building where water splashed onto fire-heated stones produced steam. Many had a low ceiling to retain heat and drains to carry away water. Some also had flues, narrow passages that helped regulate the temperature. Users could rest on low benches and drink medicinal or restorative solutions.

Piedras Negras had eight known monumental sweatbaths, three of them inside the Southeast Marketplace. These were among the smaller baths at the site and had entrance rooms separated from the main steam room. Their concentration beside the marketplace, together with extracted teeth and plant remains, places heat-based care alongside exchange and craft work. Early colonial accounts and later ethnographic research describe sweatbaths used for hygiene, treatment and childbirth in other Maya and Mesoamerican communities. Those later records show how a bath could serve the body and household, while the Piedras Negras buildings provide the local Classic-period setting.

Plants as remedies, materials and offerings

At Piedras Negras, researchers identified charred seeds and wood fragments in marketplace deposits, and pollen on two extracted diseased teeth. Several identified plants have documented medicinal uses in later Maya communities. Byrsonima crassifolia, called nance or craboo, appears in marketplace seed and wood remains. Tzotzil Maya communities in Chiapas, southern Mexico, have been recorded brewing nance bark and holding it in the mouth, or chewing it raw, for loose teeth. A charred seed of Cecropia peltata, or trumpet tree, also came from the market; in Belize, leaves of this plant are brewed as a tea for bad breath associated with liver ailments. These present-day and historical practices help explain why the ancient species are relevant to care.

Pine pollen was recovered from two pathological teeth that had been pulled and discarded with marketplace debris, but not from the surrounding sediments. Pine stands now grow at least 30 kilometers from Piedras Negras. The study proposes that pine-family resin was brought to the city for dental preparations, a reading supported by the pollen’s location on the teeth and by later Maya uses of pine for dental complaints. The residue gives a specific trace of material applied to the body; plant species in other marketplace deposits could also have served as food, fuel or craft material.

A separate Preclassic example shows plants in a ceremonial setting. At Yaxnohcah in the Maya lowlands of present-day Campeche, southern Mexico, a dark-stained deposit beneath the end of a ballcourt dates to between 158 BCE and 26 CE. Researchers analyzed environmental DNA, traces of genetic material preserved in the soil, and identified four plants, including xtabentun, a flowering vine; chili pepper; jool, a small tree; and chilcahuite, a tree. Researchers interpret the feature as a ritual deposit associated with the ballcourt’s foundation. All four plants have medicinal properties. Researchers also connect jool and chilcahuite with craft materials and chili pepper and xtabentun with divination; the plants’ placement links their uses with ceremonial acts.

Practitioners, ritual and later records

A Postclassic Maya bark-paper book, the Dresden Codex, made around 1200, contains calendrical almanacs that link days with deities. Researchers identify xtabentun leaves in two such sections beside deities. This association places the plant in ritual imagery.

For sixteenth-century Yucatán, the Franciscan writer Diego de Landa describes a ceremony for medical practitioners. Their work took place within relationships with sacred beings, ancestors and meaningful places. He reports that practitioners gathered at one person’s house and brought wrapped medicine bundles containing small images of Ixchel, whom he calls a goddess of medicine, as well as divination stones. Priests burned incense, and the practitioners rewrapped the objects of their work and carried the bundles in a dance. Landa’s account places healing knowledge, divination and ritual objects together in sixteenth-century Yucatán. His Franciscan vocabulary frames this colonial record, which comes centuries after the Classic-period evidence at Piedras Negras.