
Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest - curtis
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/mass-child-human-animal-sacrifice-peru-chimu-science/
======
spanxx
I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent
colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.

Because, no matter what culture you're part on, having your kill killed is
going to make you be against the current rulers.

No surprise small Spanish groups of sailors and great armies of native allies
could topple several empires through America.

~~~
Jedd
> I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent
> colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.

I don't think so. It's probably mostly down to what Jared Diamond describes -
Guns, Germs, and Steel.

The occasional score of children and conquests slaughtered voluntarily is
dwarfed by the numbers of natives that died from smallpox (f.e.).

~~~
yosito
Guns may have had much less to do with it than is commonly believed. I
recommend the book 1492 if you're curious about why that is.

~~~
Jedd
I tend to agree. I suspect the _availability_ of guns was useful in a few key
engagements, but the accidental weaponisation of smallpox (for example) was
much more effective in wiping out indigenous forces.

~~~
yosito
Another thing to consider is that European guns _sucked_ during that time
period. Bows and arrows and other native weapons were probably very
competitive.

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DanAndersen
I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0]
examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The
episodes were a companion to Daniele Bolelli's "History on Fire" episodes [1]
about the first contact between the Spanish and the Mexica (Aztecs), but
whereas Bolelli focuses more on the narrative drama of the events of these two
incompatible cultures clashing, Cooper's episodes are more psychological
explorations about the human condition that try to examine just where in our
human minds arises these primal urges toward cannibalism and sacrifice of
other humans and how early cultures dealt with the trauma of it in the form of
rituals.

There's a progression to it too, where cultures tend to move between different
phases (cannibalism to human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to purely symbolic
sacrifice) where those 'psychic urges' can be played out in more and more
abstract ways. It's reminiscent of Dan Carlin's episode about gladiators and
public executions [2] and how our modern culture still wants to see the
violence but to have it be virtual.

The MartyrMade podcast's analysis does a great job of juggling the two
opposing ways of looking at these cultures. On one hand there is a human
universality in that every culture and every people almost certainly has
cannibalism and human sacrifice somewhere in its deep past. On the other hand,
it's too easy for us in modern Western societies to try to interpret these
other cultural behaviors in rational ways as if deep down they're just like
us. Culture shapes its participants fundamentally; truly _alien_ ways of being
are the norm.

You can't read the account [3] of a young women ritualistically standing in
for a Maize Goddess, being beheaded, flayed, and having her too-small skin
being stretched and worn by a priest dancing before a crowd without being
reminded of the quote "The past is a foreign country; they do things
differently there." When people talk about the "cultural iceberg" [4], this
exemplifies just how _deep_ those icebergs go; it's not just language and food
and dress and dance.

\---

[0] [http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-
sacrifice/](http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/)

[1]
[http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec](http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec)

[2] [https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-61-blitz-...](https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-61-blitz-painfotainment/)

[3]
[http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html](http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html)

[4] [https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-
cultur...](https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultural-
iceberg.png)

------
bambax
Why "sacrifice" and not murder?

> _" People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he
> explains._

But then:

> _isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local
> populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the
> Chimú Empire_

To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its
heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine.
Isn't it more likely, they were taken by force?

It's always strange when we assume ancient people would necessarily be
superstitious; maybe some were, and some weren't.

Isn't it reasonable to think that mass killing would be a punishment inflicted
on one group to another, following, say, a long war, or simply a conquest?

~~~
tptacek
The Nazis deliberately murdered children by the thousands, but nobody would
call those “human sacrifices”.

~~~
dustincoates
Incidentally, that's what "Holocaust" means, and why many instead use the word
"Shoah."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust)

> The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word holokauston,
> meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering," or "a
> burnt sacrifice offered to a god."

> In Judaism, Shoah (שואה), meaning "calamity" in Hebrew, became the standard
> term for the 20th century Holocaust[2] (see Yom HaShoah). This is because
> 'Holocaust' connotes a sacrifice, and Jewish leaders argue there was no
> sacrifice.

~~~
tptacek
Wow. TIL.

------
RyanRies
How did they get red pigment on the kid's skull?

~~~
jcoffland
It started out on the skin. The skin decomposed but the red pigment remained
to settle on the skull.

