The Jolja’ Cave Project

Postclassic and Colonial History

The region around Jolja’ was occupied by Ch’ol speaking Maya when the first Spaniards arrived in this zone around A.D. 1535.  The Tila Valley contained a well established Ch’ol community, and the neighboring Tzeltal town now known as Petalcingo was subject to its rule. The Spanish subjugation of the Ch’ol Maya living in the adjacent lowlands involved forced re-location to the established communities at Tila, Tumbalá and Bachajón, or to newly created towns such as the modern town of Palenque.

An ancient road from central Chiapas to Palenque passed close to both Jolja’ and the Cerro Norte Cave. The American traveler John L. Stephens (1841) gives a vivid description of this route which he took in 1840.  On the first day, he and his companion Frederick Catherwood journeyed from the Ocosingo Valley through the Yajalón Valley to Tumbalá at the high southern end of Misopa’ Mountain. On the second day, they descended down the eastern face of Misopa’ Mountain within a few kilometers of Jolja’, and then crossed the Ixtelja’ River, climbed up and over the Cordon Sumidero range, and finally arrived at the village of San Pedro Sabanilla in the Tulijá Valley. The third day they crossed the Tulijá Valley and climbed up and over the Don Juan Mountain range skirting its western peak called Cerro Norte, and passing close to the Cerro Norte Cave. They then descended the north side of the mountain near the San Leandro River drainage, coming out on the coastal plain near the present village of Agua Blanca. The following morning they traveled southeast along the base of the Don Juan Mountain range to Palenque. Although Stephens complained bitterly about the steepness of Cerro Norte, this was the only route over the Don Juan Mountain range without crossing a second valley and set of hills. The Classic site of Miraflores, which was a subsidiary of Palenque, is adjacent to Agua Blanca, and it appears to have been so situated to control this important route.

Making ritual offerings to the mountain god was and still is an important Maya custom. In A.D. 1675, Dominican friars journeyed through the mountains of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala to convert the Chol Maya living in the region (Villagutierre Soto-Mayor 1983:100). At the top of a mountain pass, they found a ritual site where travelers made offerings to the mountain god. In 1894, Karl Sapper journeyed from northern Alta Verapaz to Yucatán via the Petén, and returned via Tabasco and Chiapas. He noted that:

At the crossing of the roads, all the Indians of Guatemala and Chiapas belonging to the tribes of the Maya family erect crosses, to which the passerby pay their respects in a singular fashion. Usually the Indian, who crosses such a pass for the first time, carries with him a stone, so that stone heaps of considerable size are frequently to be seen at these crosses…On important mountain passes the Kekchi Indian presents incense offerings burning a certain amount of copal before the cross and there repeats his prayer. At many crosses in addition to these ceremonies he dances. If a Kekchi Indian on his journey over a mountain road comes to a place where there is no cross he still presents the same offering, but addresses his prayer not to the Christian God but his chief heathen divinity, Tzulteccá (mountain/valley god) (Sapper 1897).

Sapper also noted that his Kekchi carriers stopped performing rituals altogether when they entered Belize and Yucatán because they saw no evidence that Tzulteccá was present there:

They then discontinued for two full months all religious exercises (apart from a single visit to the church at Merida on Good Friday), until in the region inhabited by the Choles in Chiapas on an elevated pass (between Sabanilla and Tila) some large wooden crosses with flowers fastened to them, were found, then Sebastian Botzoc began to attend to the devotions for himself and the others (Sapper 1897).

Jolja’ is adjacent to the route from Sabanilla to Tila. Both Jolja’ and the Cerro Norte Cave were, thus, appropriate and accessible ritual locations not only for the local population, but also for travelers journeying through this region.

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