Man Corn:
Cannibalism and Violence
in the Prehistoric American Southwest
by Christy G. Turner II
and Jacqueline A. Turner
Posted on 01/23/2005 2:26:53 PM PST by wagglebee
MEXICO CITY (AP) - It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.
Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.
For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures, others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody, but believed the Maya were less so.
"We now have the physical evidence to corroborate the written and pictorial record," said archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan. He said, "some 'pro-Indian' currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying."
The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.
But there is no longer as much doubt about the nature of the killings. Indian pictorial texts known as "codices," as well as Spanish accounts from the time, quote Indians as describing multiple forms of human sacrifice.
Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.
Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
"Many people said, 'We can't trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,' which in the long run we are confirming," said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.
In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archaeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described finding evidence of human sacrifice associated with the god of death.
"The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims," Velez Saldana said. "We found a burial pit with the skeletal remains of four children who were partially burned, and the remains of four other children that were completely carbonized."
While the remains don't show whether the victims were burned alive, there are depictions of people - apparently alive - being held down as they were burned.
The dig turned up other clues to support descriptions of sacrifices in the Magliabecchi codex, a pictorial account painted between 1600 and 1650 that includes human body parts stuffed into cooking dishes, and people sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.
"We have found cooking dishes just like that," said archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones." However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.
In 2002, government archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, the Aztec's main religious site, during a drought.
All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.
"It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice," which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.
The Maya, whose culture peaked farther east about 400 years before the Aztecs founded Mexico City in 1325, had a similar taste for sacrifice, Harvard University anthropologist David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico," Stuart wrote. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya."
But in carvings and mural paintings, he said, "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas," including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim.
Some Spanish-era texts have yet to be corroborated with physical remains. They describe Aztec priests sacrificing children and adults by sealing them in caves or drowning them. But the assumption now is that the texts appear trustworthy, said Lopez Lujan, who also works at the Templo Mayor site.
For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
"It's now a question of quantity," said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards - and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control - exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.
"We're not finding anywhere near that ... even if we added some zeros," Lopez Lujan said.
Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control.
Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed.
"It is really very difficult for us to conceive," Pijoan said of the sacrifices. "It was almost an honor for them."
thanks blam. :'D
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1326884/posts
This thread has been pulled.
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Loved that book, although it became a bit mind-numbing after a few hundred pages.
I think they meant to type "burned alive". But hey! We have to cut their supposed descendents some slack - they've toned it way down since Cortez's day. Now the only torture they inflict (warbling paeans to drug lords cranked at max volume, cerveza-shards somehow attracted to my car tires, spreading corruption through every aspect of our society) shows they're really trying to assimilate and become good, law-abiding Americans. It is me who should learn to speak Spanish and accept their rich contributions to our culture.
If I appease these people and help deconstruct our laws and culture for their advancement these neo-Aztecs might sacrifice me last...
Seriously, I overhear the term "Aztlan" thrown around a lot when overhearing their conversations. Too many believe in this mythos.
Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest
by Christy G. Turner II, Jacqueline Turner
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/087480566X/ref=pd_sim_b_6/103-2725663-9967824?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
The argument is over.
Check it out.
Well, perhaps if they were captives, but the article seemed to indicate they were treated well before sacrifice?
I don't remember talking about that stuff in Anthro in college. Maybe I blocked it out!
sundero
The sacred city of the Itza, called Chichen-Itza (chee-chehn eet-sah) in Maya, is located 75 miles east of Merida, the Capital of the State of Yucatan, Mexico. This archaeological site is rated among the most important of the Maya culture. . .The Cenote of Sacrifice was reserved for rituals involving human sacrifice involving the rain God. The victims were not only young women, but also children and elderly men and women.
G-d I'm glad I'm not in corporate america. I remember people exactly like you guys are describing.
Salesmen are sometimes like that too. I can't stand it. Back in college it seemed like the frat boys were like that too. And back in highschool it seemed like the drama club weirdos were like that.
in front of the largest of the pyramid / temples that stood in Tenochtitlan, running much of the length of the plaza, was a structure the Aztecs called "The Corncrib". It was stacked full of human skulls, fruits of the human sacrifice rituals. The Spanish cleared that out, and demolished various other structures. Some years back a double-sided sculpture of the Atzec idol Huitzilipochtli was discovered during some kind of excavation.
The revisionists are going to love this./sarcasm off
Probably the revisionists will be conspicuously silent. As I remember, a "scientist" working for the Hopi said he wouldn't accept the evidence from the bones, that he would only accept direct evidence.
As the Toyota ad says, "You asked for it, You got it" and he got it - right in the literature.
Seems that the Hopi-employed scientist had irritated another scientist, non-Hopi employed, to the extent that he sampled a coprolite (scientific-ese for old fecal mass) and found human myoglobin.
As the non-Hopi employed scientist said, "mute evidence that someone had had a human meat meal".
Given that if remains of human muscle were in the feces, human meat must have been eaten.
Revise that, Liberals!
Thanks Radix.
The reason? Easy! Thousands of warriors from the many oppressed tribes who were forced to deliver human sacrifices to the Inca and the Aztecs, JOINED the Spaniards to overthrow them.
Wouldn't you?
Man Corn:
Cannibalism and Violence
in the Prehistoric American Southwest
by Christy G. Turner II
and Jacqueline A. Turner
Sounds interesting, what's the name of the book?
LOL. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd are good examples of coprolites.
That's an excellent illustration of how refined many scientific testing techniques have become. If our ability to accept the results caught up...
How dare you insult cannibals!?! You need to open your MIND! Imagine, a way to feed the poor and a way to control the Aztec population explosion! We need cannibals TODAY! We have too many people and not enough food, we need to write to our congresspeople and let them legalize human sacrifices! Who are you to say what religion is best! They are all EQUAL!!!
Pingo
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