The Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza is a natural sinkhole about sixty metres across, north of the main pyramid at the end of a raised causeway. Between 1904 and 1910 Edward H. Thompson, an American consul who had bought the land, dredged it with a bucket and later went down himself in a diving suit. He brought up gold, jade, copal, worked wood and human bone, and he shipped much of it out of the country, which became a legal dispute in its own right.
By modern standards the dredging destroyed as much as it recovered. Position within the deposit was not recorded, so the material arrived in museums as a heap rather than as a stratified assemblage, and questions that depend on knowing what lay with what can no longer be asked of it. Later expeditions in the 1960s worked the cenote again with better method, and it was in 1967 that a chultun, a bottle-shaped subterranean chamber, was found nearby, containing the scattered remains of more than a hundred children.
The analytical work is much more recent than the recovery. Taphonomic study of the cenote remains, published in the 2007 volume edited by Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina, examined cut marks and body treatment on the surviving material. In 2024 a team led by Rodrigo Barquera sequenced whole genomes from 64 of the children in the chultun and published the result in Nature. A deposit dug up as treasure a century ago has become, by way of methods nobody then imagined, a testable body of evidence.