The cover image features a rendering from the 3D digital documentation of a funerary context at Palenque, Mexico, where two individuals, a child and an adult male, were interred in a simple grave built of stacked stones. The taphonomy of the two skeletons and the configuration of the whole context suggest that the burial was reopened in the past. Such contexts speak to the Classic Maya conception of death as a passage, evoked by the expression och bih, "he entered the road." The model, created by Mirko De Tomassi in collaboration with the Proyecto Regional Palenque (PREP), belongs to a digital collection published by the Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and designed to address the ethical implications of disseminating 3D data of ancient human remains. The collection and its underlying principles are presented in the article by Mirko De Tomassi and Andreas Frech included in this issue.
Published: 2026-08-25