Supreme and Purifying Pain: Body Concepts and Ritualized Violence among the Ancient Maya

We wish to discuss some of the multiple Maya meanings that surround the human body and the role of its vital components in ritualized violence, specifically the forms of self-sacrifice and human sacrifice itself. This essay offers a series of elements of discussion that are key to detecting and understanding the transformations of the body and its components during ritual death along with the markers that give them away in the mortuary record; the proposals put forward here were thought from the perspective of data from the lowlands during the Late Classic period (600-800 ad), although it is feasible to assume that some aspects date from earlier tiemes or survived in more recent times.