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Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

311 points by DanAndersen 8y ago

defen 8y ago
That rendering of the Templo Mayor really evokes a sense of existential dread in me...it’s one thing to see something like that in a video game or horror movie, but knowing it was real is deeply unsettling.
- erik_landerholm 8y ago
  Ahhh..the good ole days. Articles like this always speak of these acts with almost a sense of awe or reverence. Sorry, but these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting.
  - gjkood 8y ago
    Watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto gave me chills. I don't know if there are any other movies that depict the times so realisticly (atleast from a movie watcher's perspective though not from a historian's one). The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      It's worth keeping in mind that whatever else Cortez's ship represented, it certainly wasn't the welfare of the next 10 generations of Native Americans in Mexico.
      - gjkood 8y ago
        Agreed. Hence my quotes around "new world". I wish we humans can outgrow the inherent evil in ourselves, but I doubt we ever will.
      - remarkEon 8y ago
        I think it's also worth keeping in mind that Cortez and those who got off his ships would've been rightly disturbed by the scale of human sacrifice and savagery displayed by the Aztecs. That doesn't justify enslavement, certainly, but their mindset would've been one of fear and defense and that's totally understandable to me.
        tptacek 8y ago
        And, a generation later, their domination of the area firmly established and plainly evident, what then was their mindset? Was it their "fear" and "defensiveness" that led them to continue wholesale rape and slaughter across Central America?
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        Being enslaved and raped is bad, but not quite as bad as being enslaved, raped, and also being used as a source of meat. I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement, vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion. The Inquisitors tortured their victims, true enough, but they didn't eat them.
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        In addition to the 'not even comparable' level of atrocity, the scale of the direct victims of the Inquisition also paled in comparison to the full and complete systematic mass murder of the Aztec rituals. At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.
        tptacek 8y ago
        They didn't eradicate the "death cult" so much as they eradicated most of the people in Central America.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs. And the enslavement, murder, work to death, and rape of tens of millions of natives in the cruelest ways possible... whether they were part of the Aztec culture or way more peaceful tribes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Apocalypto is a brilliant film designed as an emotional mass market play, but the production design was so great it's award worthy. Mel Gibson's films usually give some insight into the nature of power and politics, which is really fun because so few attempt to bother with that kind of stuff. Listen to the DVD voice-over with he and the director of that film, they give you some amazing information as to the backstory of the political setup of the city in which the scenes took place.
  - door3 8y ago
    >these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever They weren't the ones who committed genocide on the entire continent.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting. Heck, until past century the crowds gathered to watch hangings, guillotines and other executions all over Europe. And just past century the Germans burned to death 6 million Jews, gypsies, leftists, and homosexuals. Then there are the lynchings as a means of justice (in the West) and for blacks in the South, plus other types of "mob justice" in which whole communities would often participate (or stand and enjoy the show). Those Aztec societies were cruel, but "giddy excitement over" death extends beyond them. And at least they have the excuse to not have had modern science, schooling, wikipedia, and all tons of culture back then...
    - AlexB138 8y ago
      Executions were of condemned criminals. The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany. Lynching was an illegal act. I'm not sure those really compare to industrial scale ritual sacrifice as a cornerstone of the society.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany. That was more of an effort to avoid Germany getting more powerful (and affecting them) than a humanitarian mission. Besides, half of the "western world" took side with the Nazis, including a full blown pro-Nazi government in occupied France (with tons of sympathizers pre- and during the occupation), Italy (of course), Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine, and so on. >Lynching was an illegal act. And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced.
        JackCh 8y ago
        > "And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced." Unsurprising since the act was a public display of societal contempt for the legal system. Often the person to be lynched would be torn from a jail by the mob; demonstrating that the judicial system had no power when faced by the will of the mob.
  - methodover 8y ago
    Seriously. The first thing I found myself thinking while reading the article was, what was the appropriate response to a society like that? If you’re part of a 16th century expedition, and you’ve come across a nightmare society like this, what’s the right thing to do? I’m not so quick to dismiss “conquer the country, ban human sacrifice, pave over the temples.” It might not be the worst option. :/
  - vinchuco 8y ago
    So what? It's history. It doesn't care how you feel about it. Should we abandon the past because 'we know better'?
  - JackCh 8y ago
    > "I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting." Here is the perspective of the article's author: https://mobile.twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://mobile.twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/10101786813340... I found it to be... illuminating.
Mirioron 8y ago
And they didn't even mention ball games being part of human sacrifice either. Apparently, sometimes the losers in a ball game would be sacrificed. I have a really biased view on their culture, because whenever I read about it the human sacrifice element is constantly in the back of my mind.
- YorkshireSeason 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sa...
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ourmandave 8y ago
Jeez, and I thought our immigration policies were harsh.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do this here.
abrowne 8y ago
Interesting timing soon after a review of a recent book about Cortés: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-cortes/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-c... The review says that "most estimates of the frequency of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan come from an unfounded assertion by the Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, who was born twenty-two years after the city fell. Valadés claimed that between 15,000 and 20,000 people were sacrificed in Tenochtitlan per year." Later, "Cortés’s confessor and the first formal historian of the Conquest of Mexico, raised the figure to 50,000." "The number is remarkable for how preposterous it is: more than 137 sacrifices a day, five an hour, one every twelve minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Aztec sacrifice was a nonmechanized process that demanded extensive ritual preparation and an individually selected victim, and archaeologists have never found evidence to support the Spaniards’ figures. As [the book's author] points out, although human skulls have been retrieved from ritual burial grounds close to Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor (the city’s main temple), most of the sacrificial remains that have been found belong to animals—wolves mostly—and these remains don’t add up even to hundreds of victims, let alone thousands." Also, regarding cannibalism, "owing to a [Spanish] royal law from 1503, an enemy fighter who practiced cannibalism could be enslaved for life, and shortly before Cortés left Cuba for Mexico a smallpox epidemic caused a drastic reduction in native manual labor in the Caribbean. The later narratives that were so insistent on the subject of cannibalism are always, in [the author's] view, related to the conquistador generation’s claim to cost-free indigenous servitude. This argument became especially important after the Crown abolished native slavery and gave indigenous subjects rights identical to those of Spaniards in the New Laws of 1542."
- curtis 8y ago
  The Spanish reports of the scale of human sacrifice cannot be taken at face value for the reasons you say. On the other hand there is absolutely no question that the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations were practicing human sacrifice and at a considerable scale, because we have a lot of direct archeological evidence to that effect.
- azborder 8y ago
  That entire review is ridiculous. So much bias and selective use of historical information to suit the writer’s opinion.
EngineerBetter 8y ago
Blimey, humans are really odd.
walterbell 8y ago
Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete. There's a documentary and several books about her work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kF4lue30vgg https://youtube.com/watch?v=kF4lue30vgg & https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ag5fGFwWwBU https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ag5fGFwWwBU She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. If we hope to understand other species, we can start by learning more about "other" humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele
- pgrad 8y ago
  >Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete. Says who? >She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. Source? Do you want me to buy a book too? Edit: OK, the way you wrote your post got my skepticism alarm blaring. I was thinking you were talking about some ancient aliens insanity, but that wasn't your point at all. I apologize for the confrontational post.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Edgewalker-conversation-epigrapher-interview-translation/dp/B003DLTBVM https://www.amazon.com/Edgewalker-conversation-epigrapher-in... > she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view. An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field as a young woman just some strange little painter from Alabama in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past. > it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a crucial role in breaking the code of the Maya's hieroglyphic writing system. Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings, rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele considered her most important work.
azeotropic 8y ago
They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites). Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum. Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
- kimmk 8y ago
  Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.
  - 5DFractalTetris 8y ago
    Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.
    - ggm 8y ago
      Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.
      - jack9 8y ago
        It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.
        beaconstudios 8y ago
throwaway43532 8y ago
Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva. The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it is clear that the practice (and self-mutilation, primarily of the ears) was an important aspect of not just Aztec life, but many of their neighbors' as well. Díaz writes, "I have spent a long time talking about the great cue of Tlatelcoco and its courts. I will conclude by saying that it was the biggest temple in Mexico, though there were many other fine ones, for every four or five parishes or districts supported a shrine with idols; and since there were many districts I cannot keep a count of them all. [...] Every province had its own idols, and those of one province or city were no help in another. Therefore they had infinite numbers of idols and sacrificed to them all." Discussion of deities and their numbers aside, Díaz' repeated report is that sacrifices of various sorts were widespread, and that evidence of human sacrifice, or the holding of prisoners intended for sacrifice, was found almost universally from the coast to Mexico. Edit: Reading again, on the subject of tzompantli, or a similar arrangement for sacrificed remains, Díaz writes, "They strike open the...chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the still palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey."
- partycoder 8y ago
  The Spanish themselves conducted many religion-motivated rituals of human sacrifice in Europe and in the Americas. In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas. The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and the usage of chemical weapons in the Rif war. Just an example: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg <- Spain, a Western country, did this Going back to your post: maybe their portrayal is accurate, but Spain was not any better.
coding123 8y ago
I know this comment won't be accepted too well here, but as people become vegetarians/vegans even, but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls - it becomes clear how barbaric our society STILL is. Again, only visible to some people that have rejected some pretty common norms. It is interesting because in those times it was politically and socially acceptable to be OK with other humans being sacrificed. A man explained how he hit a deer today, and I just filled with sadness, but his immediate POV was getting his car fixed, his tire no longer aligned and how his drive is wobbly. As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals.
- protonimitate 8y ago
  >> As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals. Our built is moral system is biology. We as a species are omnivores which means we have a predisposition to be O.K. with killing and processing game for food. I think its more of a miracle we are able to put our personal morals above biology and opt out of it.
- roel_v 8y ago
  What is a 'soul'? What animals have one?
  - coding123 8y ago
    Apologies for that terminology, I personally believe in that, so for anyone else, scratch that note and replace with (start seeing animals that have the same right to live here as humans) and being more pedantic, if you believe humans being animals, scratch the distinction, and replace with animals of the species of human. I'm sure I'm offending more people in trying to fix this comment lol.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - red75prime 8y ago
dogruck 8y ago
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all live like they did back before civilization was corrupted by western intruders?
partycoder 8y ago
Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale. What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way. So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
- azborder 8y ago
  Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
  - partycoder 8y ago
    I am saying that the term "human sacrifice" is rarely applied to European rituals of sacrifice involving humans. You can use the term all you want, try to not use it in a biased manner. Often depictions of human sacrifice in the Americas are used to justify the exploitation of the native people of the Americas.
    - azborder 8y ago
      It sounds like you’re advocating stretching the definition of the term to support your own bias, when it has a pretty clear meaning.
      - partycoder 8y ago
        So when superstitious Europeans kill their own for religious reasons in a ritual to please their god, that's not human sacrifice? Change my mind.
        mike00632 8y ago
        I understand what you mean. Christianity can be seen in a different light if we recognized it as being centered around human sacrifice to a monotheistic god. But I think the problem has more to do with too much veneration for Western religion than it does with biased labeling of Native American religious practices.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
This article doesn't specifically mention cannibalism, but in my twenties I read a book that posited that "the lamb" of Christianity being a symbol of peace, as well as the Hindu reverence for the cow, were based on their ability to provide food security because they are grazers who are able to turn grass into protein. Grass is not a human food source. So this means they don't compete for the same food sources we do. Aztecs had cook books full of recipes for things like "human ribs with hot peppers." Some old temples had bread fruit trees lining the avenue up to the temple. Bread fruit is another source of protein. IIRC, the book posited that the Aztecs were cannibals because South America had no native animals like cows or sheep that fed predominantly on grass. Thus they were chronically short on protein and this helped make them a very war like people. If you are all going to die anyway because there is not enough food, dying in battle is both psychologically better for the culture and offers the chance that we win, we take we what we need and we feed our people. Most wars are ultimately rooted in resource shortages. Real peace is ultimately rooted in problem solving to make sure there are enough resources to go around and that those resources get more or less equitably or "fairly" distributed, in some sense and to some degree. Society can survive economic inequality, but there comes a point past which economic inequality is too much of a hardship on some groups and this routinely goes bad places. Edit: I confess to being an Ugly American who has a bad habit of lumping South America and Central America together and not making clear distinctions in that regards. Substitute "the lands of the Aztecs" for South America.
- achamayou 8y ago
  You can get protein from other sources than large mammals feeding on grass. In fact, they’re one of the less efficient ways to produce proteins if that’s what you are worried about.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Knowing what I know these days, a bigger reason for eating meat is that it is hard to get adequate B vitamins from a vegetarian diet. In most cases, it's not that hard to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet. I don't remember the book very well. I read it around 30 years ago. Back then, protein was generally considered to be The Big Issue. It was the basis for Diet for a Small Planet. When the book first came out, it emphasized protein complementarity to solve this issue for vegetarians. It was a political tome. Half of the book was about civil wars and the like (causing starvation). The other half was vegetarian recipes. The follow up book indicated the author had since concluded that it wasn't as challenging as she once thought to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet. So it is possible this book I read was basing its hypothesis on the dominant thought of that era that protein was some big limiter. Perhaps protein per se was not the critical detail. We (probably) won't ever really know. What we do know is that the Aztecs were a very warlike people, human sacrifice was very widely practiced and they also routinely ate their victims, not solely as some barbaric religious ritual, but for dinner.
zawerf 8y ago
Are we sure it's really all human sacrifice and not just an ossuary? For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  i think maybe one bit of evidence against it being merely an ossuary is the large holes in the sides of the skulls, useful for inserting a pole. of course, that is not the last word. but, it's consistent with other evidence that large wooden poles bearing multiple skulls did exist.
  - thedailymail 8y ago
    The large holes were created post mortem, so that doesn't necessarily reject the ossuary hypothesis. But the body of evidence supporting the human sacrifice hypothesis is really pretty strong.
- JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
  > not just an ossuary? And Mexicas just happened to all die between 25 and 35 and be men ? They very clearly were killed.
jcims 8y ago
When I see a bunch of skulls in one place like this, or in the catacombs, it makes me think of the accumulated experience of people. Not because of the brains in the skulls or whatever, but just that each skull represents a single human life. Most of the time these are adult skulls, guessing 30+ years each. That's a lot of living. I just asked google to solve a couple of problems for me. What is the current population, and how many years do they experience in one hour on the wall clock? Current world population according to Google: 7.6B How many years in 7.6B hours: 867,579.9 So we are nearly at a point where there are a million years of human live/conciousness/etc experienced every hour. That's a lot.
- scarecrowbob 8y ago
  This is kind of a neat idea. Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...
  - jcims 8y ago
    Indeed!! We’re closer than we have ever been, and that trend is likely to continue.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      Thanks for posting this concept. To what extent does mass+social media create collective subgroups of consciousness? What's the decay curve of a subgroup and how do subgroups compete, fork, merge or decay? How do persistent records (oral memories, written records, national holidays, memorials, digital footprints, media archives, censorship) feed back into subgroups of collective consciousness? How can collective consciousness be measured, monetized, directed, encouraged, suppressed, or otherwise manipulated for specific purposes, within a specific bounded timeframe of a single hour or day? How do time zones affect the "nature/flavor" of consciousness in each hour, as populations sleep and wake and work and rest and ...?
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    Speculative fiction .. or religion? Because if there were some way we could access the sum total of all human experience, wouldn't that method be as close to "God" as it was ever described? One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..
InTheArena 8y ago
Threads that are respectful, interesting and insightful like this are why I adore HN. Please don’t ever change. That aside, As a historian, I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. But the archeological evidence on both Carthage and Cortez was really clear. We continue to find sites with mass sacrifices (not just of children) in Central and South America (Aztec, Mayan, and Inca) and instead of disregarding it due to the Spanish reports, students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. When I think about that I have trouble with the idea that Cortez would have come up with THAT if he was trying to slander the Mesoamerican ruling class. As he would have had no cultural references to draw on. > students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs. I keep thinking that to Mesoamerican peasants Catholicism was probably least offensive thing about the Spanish.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs. Maybe, maybe not. It didn't hurt that the Spaniards had powerful biological weapons on their side that decimated [1] the Aztec population. Same as what happened here in the United States with the native population. Had it been the natives spreading new infectious diseases to the arriving europeans, history would probably have been quite different. Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength. And even the ones that do not die off still get so sick that it completely incapacitates them for some time and hence unable to fight. They'd be very vulnerable to native attacks. The news would spread like wild fire in Europe that everybody that travels to the new world dies because of sorcery or what not. Yep, history could have turned out very differently indeed. [1]http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-what-killed-the-aztecs/ http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-wha... This is the relevant part: >>When Hernando Cortes and his army conquered Mexico starting in 1519, there were roughly about 25 million people living in what is now Mexico. A hundred years later, after a series of epidemics decimated the local population, perhaps as few as 1.2 million natives survived. Records confirm there was a smallpox epidemic in 1519 and 1520, immediately after the Europeans arrived, killing between 5 and 8 million people<<
swayvil 8y ago
They must have been getting good results.
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donbright 8y ago
im glad modern civilizations never sacrifice young people for insane belief systems.
gjpr 8y ago
Choice tweets from the author: Thanks for reading and sharing my story on Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed. But it's time for a discussion on why this practice was not "horrific" or "loaded [with] evil," as some of you have said https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world. https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244 (Credit: https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/)
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world." This is an utterly disturbing thought. To think that 'wanting to be sacrificed' can be part of, you know, a normal kind of cultural artifact, like 'coffee' or 'metallurgy' - and that her ostensible view that 'I probably shouldn't sacrifice myself' is a function of 'colonial oppression'. It's maximally postmodern and beyond bizarre. Literally mass murdering children, peeling their skin away is now 'cool' - you know - so long as it's 'really authentically part of your culture' , and not, of course something some white guy did! 2018.
75dvtwin 8y ago
It is difficult to celebrate historical achievements of our ancestors, when we read about them, passages similar to this. ".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …." "... Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed. …" But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past... I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes... May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  If you ever visit Chichen Itza, you can see murals depicting their ceremonies. One of them shows how two teams would compete in some kind of sport involving hoops and balls, and the leader of the winning team would be sacrificed. And everyone involved thought this was awesome, because it was a great honour something something the gods something sacrifice for your people something. With our modern sensibilities and rationality, it's absolutely mindboggling.
  - adventured 8y ago
    It's really not mindboggling at all, in regards to modern sensibilities. It's still regularly going on today. It's identical to blowing yourself up to kill infidels (argued as a great honor by those advocating it, you're the chosen one). And it's similar to crashing your plane into a ship as part of the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai, commiting suicide, sacrificing your life to defend the empire and emperor. To be clear, I'm not adding any commentary on the practices, merely noting the historically recent nature of very similar concepts. One of the most universal tenets of popular religions, and typically most spiritual belief in general, is self-sacrifice. With these forms of suicide, it's an other-world calling that is meant to be greater than the value of your own life. Modern sensibilities perhaps make it more shocking, however I don't see anything changing about this core concept and its practice in the next century. So long as most religions function on degrees of self-sacrifice, somewhere someone will be taking that to the next step and demanding people sacrifice their lives to some proclaimed higher calling.
relaxed 8y ago
How dare those evil conquistadors demonize such a beautiful tradition of cutting out a person's still beating heart and using their skull to create amazing architecture?
yters 8y ago
I submit that if we are any different today, it is only in degree or manner, not in kind. 56 million abortion a year worldwide is still a ritual killing of human beings. Only difference is stage of development, and not building edifices or masks out of the remains. On the other hand, we still engage in a manner of adornment by reusing the fetal remains in our medical research, and other profitable consumer goods.
- deleted 8y ago
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adityapurwa 8y ago
I wonder whether they put the head there on its skeleton form, or when it still has it flesh, eyes, brains, etc. which make the images more scary. I imagine having a wall made of decapitated head and its bloody mess is very disturbing. Anyone had any reference on information on this?
- cf498 8y ago
  >Over two seasons of excavations, INAH archaeologists collected 180 mostly complete skulls from the tower as well as thousands of skull fragments. Now, those finds sit in a lab next to the Templo Mayor ruins, being painstakingly examined by a team led by INAH anthropologist Jorge Gómez Valdés. Cut marks on the skulls leave no doubt they were defleshed after death, and the decapitation technique appears clean and uniform. "[Mexica priests] had extremely impressive anatomical knowledge, which was passed down from generation to generation," Chávez Balderas says.
User23 8y ago
Tlaloc thirsts! Look do you want rain or not?
zebraflask 8y ago
This is, in the anthropological sense, completely wrong. Widespread disease caused mass graves.
mexica123434 8y ago
They were not aztecs! They were mexicas.And to put things into context the university of oxford is older than Mexico-tenochtitlan(1325 of our age). Repeat with me mexicas.
XalvinX 8y ago
Oh, their enemies must have had WMDs. So it was fine.

311 points by DanAndersen 8y ago

That rendering of the Templo Mayor really evokes a sense of existential dread in me...it’s one thing to see something like that in a video game or horror movie, but knowing it was real is deeply unsettling.

erik_landerholm 8y ago
Ahhh..the good ole days. Articles like this always speak of these acts with almost a sense of awe or reverence. Sorry, but these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting.
- gjkood 8y ago
  Watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto gave me chills. I don't know if there are any other movies that depict the times so realisticly (atleast from a movie watcher's perspective though not from a historian's one). The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    It's worth keeping in mind that whatever else Cortez's ship represented, it certainly wasn't the welfare of the next 10 generations of Native Americans in Mexico.
    - gjkood 8y ago
      Agreed. Hence my quotes around "new world". I wish we humans can outgrow the inherent evil in ourselves, but I doubt we ever will.
    - remarkEon 8y ago
      I think it's also worth keeping in mind that Cortez and those who got off his ships would've been rightly disturbed by the scale of human sacrifice and savagery displayed by the Aztecs. That doesn't justify enslavement, certainly, but their mindset would've been one of fear and defense and that's totally understandable to me.
      - tptacek 8y ago
        And, a generation later, their domination of the area firmly established and plainly evident, what then was their mindset? Was it their "fear" and "defensiveness" that led them to continue wholesale rape and slaughter across Central America?
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        Being enslaved and raped is bad, but not quite as bad as being enslaved, raped, and also being used as a source of meat. I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement, vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion. The Inquisitors tortured their victims, true enough, but they didn't eat them.
        sonnyblarney 8y ago
        In addition to the 'not even comparable' level of atrocity, the scale of the direct victims of the Inquisition also paled in comparison to the full and complete systematic mass murder of the Aztec rituals. At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.
        tptacek 8y ago
        They didn't eradicate the "death cult" so much as they eradicated most of the people in Central America.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs. And the enslavement, murder, work to death, and rape of tens of millions of natives in the cruelest ways possible... whether they were part of the Aztec culture or way more peaceful tribes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Apocalypto is a brilliant film designed as an emotional mass market play, but the production design was so great it's award worthy. Mel Gibson's films usually give some insight into the nature of power and politics, which is really fun because so few attempt to bother with that kind of stuff. Listen to the DVD voice-over with he and the director of that film, they give you some amazing information as to the backstory of the political setup of the city in which the scenes took place.
- door3 8y ago
  >these societies were some of the most disturbing and violent ever They weren't the ones who committed genocide on the entire continent.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >were some of the most disturbing and violent ever and I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting. Heck, until past century the crowds gathered to watch hangings, guillotines and other executions all over Europe. And just past century the Germans burned to death 6 million Jews, gypsies, leftists, and homosexuals. Then there are the lynchings as a means of justice (in the West) and for blacks in the South, plus other types of "mob justice" in which whole communities would often participate (or stand and enjoy the show). Those Aztec societies were cruel, but "giddy excitement over" death extends beyond them. And at least they have the excuse to not have had modern science, schooling, wikipedia, and all tons of culture back then...
  - AlexB138 8y ago
    Executions were of condemned criminals. The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany. Lynching was an illegal act. I'm not sure those really compare to industrial scale ritual sacrifice as a cornerstone of the society.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany. That was more of an effort to avoid Germany getting more powerful (and affecting them) than a humanitarian mission. Besides, half of the "western world" took side with the Nazis, including a full blown pro-Nazi government in occupied France (with tons of sympathizers pre- and during the occupation), Italy (of course), Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine, and so on. >Lynching was an illegal act. And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced.
      - JackCh 8y ago
        > "And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced." Unsurprising since the act was a public display of societal contempt for the legal system. Often the person to be lynched would be torn from a jail by the mob; demonstrating that the judicial system had no power when faced by the will of the mob.
- methodover 8y ago
  Seriously. The first thing I found myself thinking while reading the article was, what was the appropriate response to a society like that? If you’re part of a 16th century expedition, and you’ve come across a nightmare society like this, what’s the right thing to do? I’m not so quick to dismiss “conquer the country, ban human sacrifice, pave over the temples.” It might not be the worst option. :/
- vinchuco 8y ago
  So what? It's history. It doesn't care how you feel about it. Should we abandon the past because 'we know better'?
- JackCh 8y ago
  > "I find this almost giddy excitement over human sacrifice to be very off-putting." Here is the perspective of the article's author: https://mobile.twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://mobile.twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/10101786813340... I found it to be... illuminating.

Mirioron 8y ago

And they didn't even mention ball games being part of human sacrifice either. Apparently, sometimes the losers in a ball game would be sacrificed. I have a really biased view on their culture, because whenever I read about it the human sacrifice element is constantly in the back of my mind.

YorkshireSeason 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sa...

deleted 8y ago

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ourmandave 8y ago

Jeez, and I thought our immigration policies were harsh.

dang 8y ago
Please don't do this here.

abrowne 8y ago

Interesting timing soon after a review of a recent book about Cortés: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-cortes/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-c... The review says that "most estimates of the frequency of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan come from an unfounded assertion by the Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, who was born twenty-two years after the city fell. Valadés claimed that between 15,000 and 20,000 people were sacrificed in Tenochtitlan per year." Later, "Cortés’s confessor and the first formal historian of the Conquest of Mexico, raised the figure to 50,000." "The number is remarkable for how preposterous it is: more than 137 sacrifices a day, five an hour, one every twelve minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Aztec sacrifice was a nonmechanized process that demanded extensive ritual preparation and an individually selected victim, and archaeologists have never found evidence to support the Spaniards’ figures. As [the book's author] points out, although human skulls have been retrieved from ritual burial grounds close to Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor (the city’s main temple), most of the sacrificial remains that have been found belong to animals—wolves mostly—and these remains don’t add up even to hundreds of victims, let alone thousands." Also, regarding cannibalism, "owing to a [Spanish] royal law from 1503, an enemy fighter who practiced cannibalism could be enslaved for life, and shortly before Cortés left Cuba for Mexico a smallpox epidemic caused a drastic reduction in native manual labor in the Caribbean. The later narratives that were so insistent on the subject of cannibalism are always, in [the author's] view, related to the conquistador generation’s claim to cost-free indigenous servitude. This argument became especially important after the Crown abolished native slavery and gave indigenous subjects rights identical to those of Spaniards in the New Laws of 1542."

curtis 8y ago
The Spanish reports of the scale of human sacrifice cannot be taken at face value for the reasons you say. On the other hand there is absolutely no question that the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations were practicing human sacrifice and at a considerable scale, because we have a lot of direct archeological evidence to that effect.
azborder 8y ago
That entire review is ridiculous. So much bias and selective use of historical information to suit the writer’s opinion.

EngineerBetter 8y ago

Blimey, humans are really odd.

walterbell 8y ago

Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete. There's a documentary and several books about her work: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kF4lue30vgg https://youtube.com/watch?v=kF4lue30vgg & https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ag5fGFwWwBU https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ag5fGFwWwBU She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. If we hope to understand other species, we can start by learning more about "other" humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Schele

pgrad 8y ago
>Our understanding of Maya language and culture has been rewritten over the past 50 years, thanks to the leadership of an art teacher, Linda Schele, who found that hundreds of years of "accepted archaeology wisdom" was incomplete. Says who? >She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations. Source? Do you want me to buy a book too? Edit: OK, the way you wrote your post got my skepticism alarm blaring. I was thinking you were talking about some ancient aliens insanity, but that wasn't your point at all. I apologize for the confrontational post.
- walterbell 8y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/Edgewalker-conversation-epigrapher-interview-translation/dp/B003DLTBVM https://www.amazon.com/Edgewalker-conversation-epigrapher-in... > she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view. An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field as a young woman just some strange little painter from Alabama in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past. > it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a crucial role in breaking the code of the Maya's hieroglyphic writing system. Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings, rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele considered her most important work.

azeotropic 8y ago

They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites). Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum. Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.

kimmk 8y ago
Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.
- 5DFractalTetris 8y ago
  Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.
  - ggm 8y ago
    Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.
    - jack9 8y ago
      It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.
      - beaconstudios 8y ago

throwaway43532 8y ago

Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva. The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it is clear that the practice (and self-mutilation, primarily of the ears) was an important aspect of not just Aztec life, but many of their neighbors' as well. Díaz writes, "I have spent a long time talking about the great cue of Tlatelcoco and its courts. I will conclude by saying that it was the biggest temple in Mexico, though there were many other fine ones, for every four or five parishes or districts supported a shrine with idols; and since there were many districts I cannot keep a count of them all. [...] Every province had its own idols, and those of one province or city were no help in another. Therefore they had infinite numbers of idols and sacrificed to them all." Discussion of deities and their numbers aside, Díaz' repeated report is that sacrifices of various sorts were widespread, and that evidence of human sacrifice, or the holding of prisoners intended for sacrifice, was found almost universally from the coast to Mexico. Edit: Reading again, on the subject of tzompantli, or a similar arrangement for sacrificed remains, Díaz writes, "They strike open the...chest with flint knives and hastily tear out the still palpitating heart which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to the beasts of prey."

partycoder 8y ago
The Spanish themselves conducted many religion-motivated rituals of human sacrifice in Europe and in the Americas. In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas. The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and the usage of chemical weapons in the Rif war. Just an example: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg <- Spain, a Western country, did this Going back to your post: maybe their portrayal is accurate, but Spain was not any better.

coding123 8y ago

I know this comment won't be accepted too well here, but as people become vegetarians/vegans even, but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls - it becomes clear how barbaric our society STILL is. Again, only visible to some people that have rejected some pretty common norms. It is interesting because in those times it was politically and socially acceptable to be OK with other humans being sacrificed. A man explained how he hit a deer today, and I just filled with sadness, but his immediate POV was getting his car fixed, his tire no longer aligned and how his drive is wobbly. As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals.

protonimitate 8y ago
>> As a species we really don't have a built in moral system, it's nearly 100% socially driven morals. Our built is moral system is biology. We as a species are omnivores which means we have a predisposition to be O.K. with killing and processing game for food. I think its more of a miracle we are able to put our personal morals above biology and opt out of it.
roel_v 8y ago
What is a 'soul'? What animals have one?
- coding123 8y ago
  Apologies for that terminology, I personally believe in that, so for anyone else, scratch that note and replace with (start seeing animals that have the same right to live here as humans) and being more pedantic, if you believe humans being animals, scratch the distinction, and replace with animals of the species of human. I'm sure I'm offending more people in trying to fix this comment lol.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - red75prime 8y ago

dogruck 8y ago

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all live like they did back before civilization was corrupted by western intruders?

partycoder 8y ago

Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale. What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way. So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.

azborder 8y ago
Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
- partycoder 8y ago
  I am saying that the term "human sacrifice" is rarely applied to European rituals of sacrifice involving humans. You can use the term all you want, try to not use it in a biased manner. Often depictions of human sacrifice in the Americas are used to justify the exploitation of the native people of the Americas.
  - azborder 8y ago
    It sounds like you’re advocating stretching the definition of the term to support your own bias, when it has a pretty clear meaning.
    - partycoder 8y ago
      So when superstitious Europeans kill their own for religious reasons in a ritual to please their god, that's not human sacrifice? Change my mind.
      - mike00632 8y ago
        I understand what you mean. Christianity can be seen in a different light if we recognized it as being centered around human sacrifice to a monotheistic god. But I think the problem has more to do with too much veneration for Western religion than it does with biased labeling of Native American religious practices.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

This article doesn't specifically mention cannibalism, but in my twenties I read a book that posited that "the lamb" of Christianity being a symbol of peace, as well as the Hindu reverence for the cow, were based on their ability to provide food security because they are grazers who are able to turn grass into protein. Grass is not a human food source. So this means they don't compete for the same food sources we do. Aztecs had cook books full of recipes for things like "human ribs with hot peppers." Some old temples had bread fruit trees lining the avenue up to the temple. Bread fruit is another source of protein. IIRC, the book posited that the Aztecs were cannibals because South America had no native animals like cows or sheep that fed predominantly on grass. Thus they were chronically short on protein and this helped make them a very war like people. If you are all going to die anyway because there is not enough food, dying in battle is both psychologically better for the culture and offers the chance that we win, we take we what we need and we feed our people. Most wars are ultimately rooted in resource shortages. Real peace is ultimately rooted in problem solving to make sure there are enough resources to go around and that those resources get more or less equitably or "fairly" distributed, in some sense and to some degree. Society can survive economic inequality, but there comes a point past which economic inequality is too much of a hardship on some groups and this routinely goes bad places. Edit: I confess to being an Ugly American who has a bad habit of lumping South America and Central America together and not making clear distinctions in that regards. Substitute "the lands of the Aztecs" for South America.

achamayou 8y ago
You can get protein from other sources than large mammals feeding on grass. In fact, they’re one of the less efficient ways to produce proteins if that’s what you are worried about.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Knowing what I know these days, a bigger reason for eating meat is that it is hard to get adequate B vitamins from a vegetarian diet. In most cases, it's not that hard to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet. I don't remember the book very well. I read it around 30 years ago. Back then, protein was generally considered to be The Big Issue. It was the basis for Diet for a Small Planet. When the book first came out, it emphasized protein complementarity to solve this issue for vegetarians. It was a political tome. Half of the book was about civil wars and the like (causing starvation). The other half was vegetarian recipes. The follow up book indicated the author had since concluded that it wasn't as challenging as she once thought to get adequate protein from a vegetarian diet. So it is possible this book I read was basing its hypothesis on the dominant thought of that era that protein was some big limiter. Perhaps protein per se was not the critical detail. We (probably) won't ever really know. What we do know is that the Aztecs were a very warlike people, human sacrifice was very widely practiced and they also routinely ate their victims, not solely as some barbaric religious ritual, but for dinner.

zawerf 8y ago

Are we sure it's really all human sacrifice and not just an ossuary? For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris

HillaryBriss 8y ago
i think maybe one bit of evidence against it being merely an ossuary is the large holes in the sides of the skulls, useful for inserting a pole. of course, that is not the last word. but, it's consistent with other evidence that large wooden poles bearing multiple skulls did exist.
- thedailymail 8y ago
  The large holes were created post mortem, so that doesn't necessarily reject the ossuary hypothesis. But the body of evidence supporting the human sacrifice hypothesis is really pretty strong.
JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
> not just an ossuary? And Mexicas just happened to all die between 25 and 35 and be men ? They very clearly were killed.

jcims 8y ago

When I see a bunch of skulls in one place like this, or in the catacombs, it makes me think of the accumulated experience of people. Not because of the brains in the skulls or whatever, but just that each skull represents a single human life. Most of the time these are adult skulls, guessing 30+ years each. That's a lot of living. I just asked google to solve a couple of problems for me. What is the current population, and how many years do they experience in one hour on the wall clock? Current world population according to Google: 7.6B How many years in 7.6B hours: 867,579.9 So we are nearly at a point where there are a million years of human live/conciousness/etc experienced every hour. That's a lot.

scarecrowbob 8y ago
This is kind of a neat idea. Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...
- jcims 8y ago
  Indeed!! We’re closer than we have ever been, and that trend is likely to continue.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Thanks for posting this concept. To what extent does mass+social media create collective subgroups of consciousness? What's the decay curve of a subgroup and how do subgroups compete, fork, merge or decay? How do persistent records (oral memories, written records, national holidays, memorials, digital footprints, media archives, censorship) feed back into subgroups of collective consciousness? How can collective consciousness be measured, monetized, directed, encouraged, suppressed, or otherwise manipulated for specific purposes, within a specific bounded timeframe of a single hour or day? How do time zones affect the "nature/flavor" of consciousness in each hour, as populations sleep and wake and work and rest and ...?
- mmjaa 8y ago
  Speculative fiction .. or religion? Because if there were some way we could access the sum total of all human experience, wouldn't that method be as close to "God" as it was ever described? One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..

InTheArena 8y ago

Threads that are respectful, interesting and insightful like this are why I adore HN. Please don’t ever change. That aside, As a historian, I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. But the archeological evidence on both Carthage and Cortez was really clear. We continue to find sites with mass sacrifices (not just of children) in Central and South America (Aztec, Mayan, and Inca) and instead of disregarding it due to the Spanish reports, students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.

Gibbon1 8y ago
> I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. When I think about that I have trouble with the idea that Cortez would have come up with THAT if he was trying to slander the Mesoamerican ruling class. As he would have had no cultural references to draw on. > students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs. I keep thinking that to Mesoamerican peasants Catholicism was probably least offensive thing about the Spanish.
felipemnoa 8y ago
>>were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs. Maybe, maybe not. It didn't hurt that the Spaniards had powerful biological weapons on their side that decimated [1] the Aztec population. Same as what happened here in the United States with the native population. Had it been the natives spreading new infectious diseases to the arriving europeans, history would probably have been quite different. Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength. And even the ones that do not die off still get so sick that it completely incapacitates them for some time and hence unable to fight. They'd be very vulnerable to native attacks. The news would spread like wild fire in Europe that everybody that travels to the new world dies because of sorcery or what not. Yep, history could have turned out very differently indeed. [1]http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-what-killed-the-aztecs/ http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-wha... This is the relevant part: >>When Hernando Cortes and his army conquered Mexico starting in 1519, there were roughly about 25 million people living in what is now Mexico. A hundred years later, after a series of epidemics decimated the local population, perhaps as few as 1.2 million natives survived. Records confirm there was a smallpox epidemic in 1519 and 1520, immediately after the Europeans arrived, killing between 5 and 8 million people<<

swayvil 8y ago

They must have been getting good results.

deleted 8y ago

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donbright 8y ago

im glad modern civilizations never sacrifice young people for insane belief systems.

gjpr 8y ago

Choice tweets from the author: Thanks for reading and sharing my story on Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, the rack where the skulls of the sacrificed were displayed. But it's time for a discussion on why this practice was not "horrific" or "loaded [with] evil," as some of you have said https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv https://t.co/GBZW1TXflv https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world. https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244 (Credit: https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/makes-ya-think/)

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking. How I see the world, filtered through centuries of colonial oppression and destruction, is irrelevant to understanding how they saw the world." This is an utterly disturbing thought. To think that 'wanting to be sacrificed' can be part of, you know, a normal kind of cultural artifact, like 'coffee' or 'metallurgy' - and that her ostensible view that 'I probably shouldn't sacrifice myself' is a function of 'colonial oppression'. It's maximally postmodern and beyond bizarre. Literally mass murdering children, peeling their skin away is now 'cool' - you know - so long as it's 'really authentically part of your culture' , and not, of course something some white guy did! 2018.

75dvtwin 8y ago

It is difficult to celebrate historical achievements of our ancestors, when we read about them, passages similar to this. ".... Other Mesoamerican cultures also engaged in human sacrifice and built tzompantlis. But, "The Mexica certainly brought this to an extreme," says Vera Tiesler …." "... Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed. …" But, yet, we do. And I guess, we are the descendants of the survivors, and in our chromosomes -- especially the ones inherited from the paternal lineage -- we have the 'winners' of the wars of the past... I still can not comprehend, how a grown man can do stuff like this, especially to a woman or a child, staring into their eyes... May be the people who performed these things, had to medicate themselves to alter their own consciousness of some sort. Otherwise, how could they?

henrikschroder 8y ago
If you ever visit Chichen Itza, you can see murals depicting their ceremonies. One of them shows how two teams would compete in some kind of sport involving hoops and balls, and the leader of the winning team would be sacrificed. And everyone involved thought this was awesome, because it was a great honour something something the gods something sacrifice for your people something. With our modern sensibilities and rationality, it's absolutely mindboggling.
- adventured 8y ago
  It's really not mindboggling at all, in regards to modern sensibilities. It's still regularly going on today. It's identical to blowing yourself up to kill infidels (argued as a great honor by those advocating it, you're the chosen one). And it's similar to crashing your plane into a ship as part of the Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgeki Tai, commiting suicide, sacrificing your life to defend the empire and emperor. To be clear, I'm not adding any commentary on the practices, merely noting the historically recent nature of very similar concepts. One of the most universal tenets of popular religions, and typically most spiritual belief in general, is self-sacrifice. With these forms of suicide, it's an other-world calling that is meant to be greater than the value of your own life. Modern sensibilities perhaps make it more shocking, however I don't see anything changing about this core concept and its practice in the next century. So long as most religions function on degrees of self-sacrifice, somewhere someone will be taking that to the next step and demanding people sacrifice their lives to some proclaimed higher calling.

relaxed 8y ago

How dare those evil conquistadors demonize such a beautiful tradition of cutting out a person's still beating heart and using their skull to create amazing architecture?

yters 8y ago

I submit that if we are any different today, it is only in degree or manner, not in kind. 56 million abortion a year worldwide is still a ritual killing of human beings. Only difference is stage of development, and not building edifices or masks out of the remains. On the other hand, we still engage in a manner of adornment by reusing the fetal remains in our medical research, and other profitable consumer goods.

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adityapurwa 8y ago

I wonder whether they put the head there on its skeleton form, or when it still has it flesh, eyes, brains, etc. which make the images more scary. I imagine having a wall made of decapitated head and its bloody mess is very disturbing. Anyone had any reference on information on this?

cf498 8y ago
>Over two seasons of excavations, INAH archaeologists collected 180 mostly complete skulls from the tower as well as thousands of skull fragments. Now, those finds sit in a lab next to the Templo Mayor ruins, being painstakingly examined by a team led by INAH anthropologist Jorge Gómez Valdés. Cut marks on the skulls leave no doubt they were defleshed after death, and the decapitation technique appears clean and uniform. "[Mexica priests] had extremely impressive anatomical knowledge, which was passed down from generation to generation," Chávez Balderas says.

User23 8y ago

Tlaloc thirsts! Look do you want rain or not?

zebraflask 8y ago

This is, in the anthropological sense, completely wrong. Widespread disease caused mass graves.

mexica123434 8y ago

They were not aztecs! They were mexicas.And to put things into context the university of oxford is older than Mexico-tenochtitlan(1325 of our age). Repeat with me mexicas.

XalvinX 8y ago

Oh, their enemies must have had WMDs. So it was fine.