Archeologists Unearth Evidence of Human Sacrifice

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Archeologists Unearth
Evidence Of Human Sacrifice

By Mark Stevenson
Associated Press
1-22-5
http://www.rense.com/general62/eevi.htm

MEXICO CITY -- It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as history books say? Or did Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the cultures appear primitive?

In recent years, archeologists have uncovered mounting evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.

Using high-tech forensic tools, archeologists are proving that such sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killings.

For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased, aiming to denigrate Indian cultures; others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, and 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," archeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan said.

The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the number of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Mesoamerican religion.

But there is no longer 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, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive and 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.

In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archeologist Nadia Velez Saldana described finding evidence of human sacrifice associated with the god of death. "The sacrifice involved burning or partially burning victims. 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."

Although the remains do not 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 eating as the god of death looks on. "We have found cooking dishes just like that," said archeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa.

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 carvings and mural paintings, he says, "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas," including one that depicts Mayan ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim.
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