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An Aztec human sacrifice ceremony |
For a long time, there has been debate about whether the Aztec and Maya practiced the brutal custom of human sacrifice as recorded in historical texts. Now, archaeologists have gathered substantial evidence to confirm this gruesome truth.
Utilizing advanced forensic tools, archaeologists have demonstrated that ancient sacrificial rituals involved a series of barbaric killings, with children being the primary victims.
For decades, many researchers have argued that the Spanish occupation of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries distorted the truth in order to diminish the civilization of the indigenous peoples. Some suggest that these sacrifices were only directed at prisoners of war. Others concede that while the Aztecs may have been bloodthirsty, the Maya were not.
“Now we have concrete evidence to corroborate the recorded documents“, stated archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan from Harvard University.
The illustrations from the indigenous people, along with accounts from the Spanish, depict savage forms of human sacrifice. Victims were beheaded, had their hearts ripped out, shot with arrows, torn apart, stoned, crushed, dismembered, skinned, buried alive, or thrown from the tops of temples. Children were the main victims because they were considered pure and innocent.
More than a decade ago, anthropologist Carmen Pijoan claimed to have found one of the first pieces of evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture: human bones with cut marks.
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| Aztec skeletons excavated in Ecatepec, Mexico. |
Last December, while excavating Aztec-era land in Ecatepec, north of Mexico City, archaeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described a ritual sacrifice to the god of death. “The victims were either burned or partially charred,” Velez Saldana said. “We found a burial pit containing the charred remains of four children, and the remnants of four other children who were completely burned.”
Although these remains do not conclusively prove that the victims were burned alive, there are paintings depicting scenes of living people being tied up and burned.
This excavation also revealed other clues that support a painting dating from around 1600 to 1650, depicting body parts piled in large cauldrons with people sitting around feasting while the god of death observes.
“We found such cooking utensils. Alongside complete human skeletons, there were also fragmented and cut bones“, researcher Luis Manuel Gamboa stated.
In 2002, archaeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza published findings from the examination of bones from 42 children, mostly six-year-old boys, who were sacrificed at the Templo Mayor during the Aztec period in Mexico City. They all shared a common feature: holes, pockmarks, or punctures on the bones, suggesting that the children had cried out in pain.
“The cries of children during the ceremony would signal a good omen. It could be produced by slitting their throats“, Roman Berrelleza said.
The Maya civilization, which thrived around 400 years before the Aztecs established Mexico City in 1325, also practiced similar human sacrifices, noted anthropologist David Stuart from Harvard University.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, researchers attempted to distinguish between the peaceful Maya and the barbaric Aztec. They also sought to prove that sacrificial killings were rare in Maya society.
However, according to Stuart, in the paintings and carvings, “we have found more and more similarities between the Aztecs and the Maya. One includes a Maya ceremony where a priest in grotesque attire is extracting the intestines from a living person.”
Some Spanish texts align with the artifacts found, describing Aztec priests killing children and adults by imprisoning them in caves or drowning them.
“The issue now is just about the numbers,” Lopez Lujan remarked. He believes that the Spanish exaggerated the number of victims to justify their campaign against the practices, including the case of 80,400 people allegedly sacrificed during the inauguration of a temple in 1487.
Researchers have collectively dismissed the hypothesis that sacrifice and cannibalism stemmed from food scarcity during the Aztec period. Pre-Hispanic cultures believed that the world would perish without sacrificial rituals. Meanwhile, the victims of sacrifice were viewed as sacred before their deaths.
“It’s hard for us to imagine. For them – the sacrificed ones – it was almost an honor“, Lujan reflected.
Minh Thi
