storey: it sure is. widmer: okay, here's the entrance. i'll tell you what, rebecca -- i'll go in first. you can hand the lantern down to me. storey: that's a good idea. yeah. go ahead. widmer: it's not as tight as it looks, but it does go down. keach: storey and widmer reach the first small chamber. gordon reported that he found the bones and pots in a second chamber beyond this one. storey: looks like a tighter fit than the other one. widmer: oh, yeah, it is. storey: looks longer, too. widmer: yeah, but i can see the bottom. don't see any bats. well, i'm standing in gordon's test pit. storey: human bone. there is human bone here, yes. keach: the cave floor is made of limestone and decomposed bat guano. that's the reason for the masks. the dry soil has preserved the bones for 3,000 years or more. storey: good place to put a pit. let's put a pit right here. depending on the age and sex pattern that we find among the skeletons, it will tell us a lot about the social organization of that culture. if everyone is treated the same way, whether they are old or young, male or female, then it's p

keach: archaeologist rebecca storey specializes in reading the bones for clues to ancient diet and health is a young maya woman. i know she's of high rank because she has the artifical deformation of the skull. notice how it's flattened here in the front and in the back. her head was deliberately bound, probably by her parents, to give her this kind of a profile. besides the head flattening, though, she also has the nice dental mutilation -- this very nice elaborate kind of cross pattern -- done to her to, also, indicate her high rank. now, the importance of this skull is not so much the evidence of high rank but the evidence, instead, of stress. here on the back, i have the remains of what was iron deficiency anemia. the bone becomes very porous and spongy as the body reacts to the malnutrition in the diet. now, she was lucky. it healed. i have several skeletons at copan, however, that did not survive the episode. and here you can see the sponginess and porosity of the active lesion of the anemia. this individual, unfortunately, died before it could heal. keach: anemia can be seen in ove

physical anthropologist rebecca storey. it didn't take much looking at them to see, of course, that they have been deliberately modified. this one here, of course, has been cut. there are drill holes in these. we don't naturally have those kind of holes in our skull. there are evidences of cut marks where they might have removed flesh or skin from the individual. these are probably the remnants of individuals killed in battle. and in order for them to remember or commemorate their victory over this individual, they would take his skull and make it into a mask. now, they undoubtedly did this so that it could be used as a mask either to hang right here or as an actual mask. we also know that he had an elite rank, probably, because of the jade inlay in the teeth usually found only with maya nobles. keach: on one level, maya warfare was the sport of kings and nobles. they would raid a neighboring city to capture a few high-level people for public sacrifice. the higher the rank of the captives -- other rulers are best -- the mor