SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER Sacrifice of the Social Outcasts: Two Cases of Klippel–Feil Syndrome at Midnight Terror Cave, Belize C. L. KIEFFER a,b,c * a Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, NM, USA b Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA c Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque, NM, USA ABSTRACT The archaeological record indicates that the ancient lowland Maya sacrificed a wide variety of people in caves for various reasons. Ritual theorists have proposed that individuals chosen for sacrifice cross- culturally are typically outsiders either geographically or socially with slaves, prisoners of war, children (typically orphaned), sorcerers and the physically handicapped. Prior to this study, all but the physically handicapped were documented as sacrificial victims at cave sites. The site of Midnight Terror Cave in the Cayo District of Belize contains at least 118 individuals and is now one of the largest sacrificial assemblages ever discovered in the Maya Lowlands. This assemblage supports previous notions of who the ancient Maya chose for human sacrifice and documents the first cases of physically handicapped sacrifices. Two individ- uals with probable Klippel–Feil syndrome, a physically debilitating pathological condition with many associ- ated abnormalities that would have made certain aspects of social life difficult, were documented in the assemblage. Ultimately, these results suggest that ritual theory predicts all the types of social outcasts chosen for sacrifice Maya caves. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: Klippel–Feil syndrome; Maya; bioarchaeology; sacrifice; cave archaeology; commingled remains; Late Classic Introduction Ritual theorists propose that individuals chosen for sac- rifice are typically outsiders or foreigners either geo- graphically or socially, but not too foreign (Girard, 1979). Girard elaborates that those being sacrificed have to be known by the sacrificing group as people who do not belong or do not yet belong to the group. In the Maya area, this would probably translate to people who looked Maya, spoke a Mayan language (possibly a different dialect), but might not have been born or resided in the polity that performed the sacri- fice. This idea of outsider or another could also be applied to individuals from within the polity that was performing the sacrifice, but were not socially accepted as full members of the group due to illness or age. So- cial outcasts on the fringe of society have been sug- gested to include the following: ‘prisoners of war, slaves, small children, unmarried adolescents, and the handicapped’ (Girard, 1979:12). This theory fits the Maya situation, because captives and children who may not have been initiated into the community or or- phaned are commonly noted as sacrificial victims in the ethnohistorical accounts (Tozzer, 1941). Until now, the one class of ‘social outcasts’ that has not been documented as sacrificial victims are individuals with disfigurements or physical handicaps. The absence of social outcasts documented as sacrifices is rather sur- prising, given some physically handicapped conditions would render them useless in putting up a fight if some- one attempted to capture and sacrifice them. These two individuals from a mostly sacrificial Maya assemblage in Midnight Terror Cave (MTC), Belize are unique in being the first cases demonstrating sacrifice of physi- cally handicapped individuals in the Maya area. * Correspondence to: C. L. Kieffer, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Anthropology Department, University of New Mexico, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. e-mail: kieffer@unm.edu Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 30 November 2014 Revised 7 March 2015 Accepted 20 March 2015 International Journal of Osteoarchaeology Int. J. Osteoarchaeol. (2015) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/oa.2456