Chopped-up skulls found in Maya 'blood cave' were a ritual offering for a good harvest, archaeologists suggest

A series of stacked human skulls lie face-down in the mud at the bottom of a cave.

Deep in an underground cave in Guatemala, archaeologists stumbled upon hundreds of fragmented human bones showing signs of injury. The discovery paints a chilling picture: The people here were sacrificed during the dry season to appease the Maya rain god — or parts of them were.

"The emerging pattern that we're seeing is that there are body parts and not bodies," Michele Bleuze, a bioarchaeologist at California State University, Los Angeles, told Live Science. "In Maya ritual, body parts are just as valuable as the whole body," she said.