What did dogs mean to the ancient Maya? Scientists are unlocking new clues.

Long before the advent of kennel clubs, backyard breeders, and animal rescues, the ancient Maya traded dogs over long distances. 

“Dogs are the oldest domesticated animal worldwide,” says Elizabeth Paris, an archaeologist specializing in the ancient Maya at the University of Calgary and a National Geographic Explorer. “The Maya valued those relationships and honestly, went through a lot of time and trouble to get special dogs and to breed special dogs.”

Exactly how the Maya viewed dogs hasn’t always been clear. But new archaeological research from Paris and others has revealed more about how dogs figured into their culture and economy. It’s a gripping tale of money, sacrifice, consumption, and status. 

What we know about Maya dogs 

Colonial writings offer some clue about dog roles in the ancient Maya world. Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa, infamous for conducting an inquisition and for burning loads of Maya codices full of cultural knowledge in the 16^th century, later wrote about the place of dogs in Maya society, including as victims in ritual sacrifice. He describes white dogs with dark spots, in particular, being sacrificed in cacao-growing celebrations.

(Here’s why the idea that the Maya civilization “collapsed” is wrong.) 

Maya practices described in the time of Spanish conquest can’t necessarily be trusted or attributed to the Maya of centuries, or even millennia earlier—culture sometimes changes. But in older periods, researchers are still finding clues about the place of dogs in earlier Maya societies.  Dogs with these features—white with dark spots—show up on Maya vases and other depictions for example, “I think it’s a type of dog they had a lot of at that time,” says Ashley Sharpe, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. 

Some vases reveal a more specific role. In at least four different depictions, dogs—sometimes white with dark spots—can be seen walking or standing underneath a ruler’s hammock as he’s carried along. Some have interpreted this art as a depiction of a burial procession, with dogs playing the role of a kind of guide to the afterlife. But Paris believes they just show the way that some Maya rulers travelled, with a dog playing a role as either a companion or a sort of status symbol—some even show dogs with some sort of scarf or accessory. 

While written records and artwork can only reveal so much about dogs’ place in ancient Maya society, archaeological finds show canine connections across Maya settlements, going back centuries.    

A dog is what it eats

Researchers have used the chemical profiles of dog bones to figure out where the dogs were born. Animals absorb chemical elements from the food they eat, and variations in these elements called isotopes depend on the type of food and where it was grown.

In 2018, Sharpe and her colleagues reported connections between dogs buried at two Maya cities in modern-day Guatemala, Kaminaljuyu and Ceibal. Both were occupied from around 700 to 350 B.C., the middle of the Preclassic period when the Maya began to build settlements to A.D. 900 at the end of the Classic period, when the civilization developed its writing system and erected many pyramids. They found that some dog remains in Ceibal—a lowland limestone area—originated in highland areas such as Kaminaljuyu, while some remains found at Kaminaljuyu came from lowland areas. 

“This was an indication that dogs must have been moving up and down the mountains somehow,” Sharpe says. But it likely wasn’t on their own four legs. (Nearly all the dogs she’s seen in archaeological digs were quite small.)

Recent studies have drawn more detailed links over even longer distances. In research published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Paris and her colleagues analyzed the chemical profiles of dog remains discovered at two Classic Maya sites, Moxviquil and Tenam Puente, in the Chiapas Highlands in southern Mexico.

Moxviquil was a town with about 1,000 residents surrounded by funerary caves, one of which contained both human and dog remains. On the other hand, Tenam Puente, once home to more than 5,000, had a grand plaza with a ritual area, three ball game courts and a market where Paris and her colleagues found dog remains.

The team wanted to determine where the dogs they’d excavated came from. So, they compared isotope values of the element strontium in the bones to a database of strontium signatures from across the world, which they had helped build and published recently in the journal Scientific Data.

All four dogs from Tenam Puente lived around A.D. 500-800 and came to the area from hundreds of miles away. One likely arrived from the southern part of Campeche state near the Guatemalan border, an area near the contemporary power center of Calakmul; the other three likely come from the area around Becan, which is even further north.

(The hidden ruins of the Maya Snake Kingdom were almost lost to time.)

The three Moxviquil dogs had strontium signatures from all over the place. One was relatively local, perhaps even coming from Tenam Puente just to Moxviquil’s south. The second came from the area around Mayapan, a great Maya capital that thrived long after the dogs died. The third dog may have come from the Palenque area, another big city at the time. They all dated to around A.D. 422 to 691.

Paris says that this chemical analysis adds to evidence that dogs were likely an important part of the economy between far-flung Maya kingdoms at the period “You have a trade of dogs over vast distances,” Paris says. It’s possible that some areas were better known for breeding dogs, exporting them in exchange for other goods with distant Maya kingdoms.  

Sharpe, who wasn’t involved in Paris’ study, agrees: “This study is confirming a lot of the patterns we are starting to see.”

Why did the Maya trade dogs?

The specifics of how this dog trade occurred are still hard to nail down, Paris says. It’s clear that the highland Chiapas sites of Tenam Puente and Moxviquil had relationships with other Maya cities, but exactly what drove this dog market gets back to the broader debate over how the culture viewed the animals.

Sharpe suspects a very practical purpose: food. Nearly all the dogs Sharpe has seen are quite small—something a little bigger than a chihuahua. To her, they resemble the dogs depicted on the famous Colima figurines found in western Mexico, which weren’t made by Maya. The Colima dogs are shaped like modern corgis and are similar to the size of the remains Sharpe has found. 

“I’m pretty sure they were little fat dogs,” Sharpe says. She believes they were bred primarily for human consumption—something like small pigs. Almost all the dogs she has examined were between one and two years of age, based on the state of the bones. “It wasn’t worth keeping old dogs around for a long time if you’re just eating them,” she says. Many also have cut marks consistent with meat processing. “It’s very systematic, they’re skinning them like a rabbit,” she says. “Why else would they be dying so young, systematically?”

Still, some discoveries point to ritual purposes, as well. In Kaminaljuyu, for example, researchers found a number of dogs in a pit. The remains date to a time when a nearby lake—an important drinking source for the city—was drying up. Some archaeologists have speculated that the Maya sacrificed the dogs to appeal to the gods to stop the lake from drying up, Sharpe says. Many of the skeletons have cut marks along their necks and were buried alongside pot shards in an area lined with boulders. “That, I would say, is evidence of sacrifice—you can’t get better than that,” she says.

Improved DNA extraction techniques could help researchers learn more about what types of dogs were used in specific situations—and how they relate to modern dog breeds like Mexico’s hairless Xoloitzcuintli. But ultimately, Sharpe suspects that canines played several familiar roles similar to dogs today, such as status symbols, companions or hunting aids, as well as less familiar ones, like dinner and sacrificial victims. 

“Their relationship with dogs is more complicated than our relationship with dogs today,” Sharpe says.