
Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital - DanAndersen
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital
======
azeotropic
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.

~~~
narrator
As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one
hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does
not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other
religions for this practice.

[https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice](https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice)

That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that
this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.

~~~
stevenwoo
I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his
son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message
alongside what you are posting.

~~~
booleandilemma
It ends up being just a test though:

God says, a few lines later, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything
to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your
son, your only son, from me.”

~~~
stevenwoo
Sorry if I was not clear, I do know the whole story, Abraham had to be
committed to the act and visualize what would happen and had to take several
steps along the way to fulfil God's command. The fact that it was revealed to
be a test is not important in my evaluation of the command, which of course is
just my opinion.

------
throwaway43532
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
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.

~~~
patrickg_zill
This is whataboutism, I think.

~~~
watwut
Then again, it makes sense to put things into historical perspective. When we
are about to talk about how one group was murderous and cruel, and how odd it
makes us feel, it makes sense to point out what was going on elsewhere.
Especially when the exact group reporting on those things is involved in
cruelties of their own and uses these reports to excuse their own cruelties.

Cortez him self was quite cruel, fond of torture - either when looking for
gold or enemies.

~~~
austinheap
People can’t stay on topic these days. More interested in being Internet arm
charm historians what-about-ing every topic possible.

It’s just an article about Aztecs.

~~~
watwut
People up thread discuss how good guy Cortez must have been, merely affected
by Aztek sacrifices and saving locals. That is somehow on topic? Why the
difference?

It is as if people were emotionally invested into this, despite this being
hundred years old affair.

So yes, this matters because thread up there want to make adventure book out
of this. It is not about trying to figure history, it is about treating it all
as scary book.

~~~
int_19h
People up thread merely noted that Cortez was likely correct, and we shouldn't
have so hastily disbelieved his claims. They said nothing about him being a
"good guy" etc.

~~~
watwut
His claims were not hastily disbelieved. That is not how history happened
there, they were both taken as total truth and disbelieved. His claims were
disbelieve for various reasons, notably that he extracted quite a few
admissions under severe torture. Notably, disbelieved also by his
contemporaries who watched it and wrote horrified reports. He tortured also
because gold seeking, not just for human sacrifice cause. They became paranoid
and over drunk with unlimited power. When people in group X kill each other
and then you kill them all, you was unlikely to be merely horrified and trying
to help victims. Your motivations are guaranteed to he more complicated, as
much as believe in your good intentions make us feel good.

You can have human sacrifice without it being impossibly large and without it
being treated like adventure movie plot and without jumping on every fantasy
anyone ever wrote - which is what up thread is. You can belive scientific
consensus which is based on multiple sources and findings without making feel
good stuff about conquest.

And while you are expressing outrage over exceptional kills, it is fine to ask
who the source is. Because it does put things into context as it turns out the
report is not by independent third party, but by highly motivated player in
political and violent struggle for control.

------
InTheArena
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.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>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-
wha...](http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-what-killed-
the-aztecs/)

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<<

~~~
natecavanaugh
History could have turned out differently, but wouldn't it require other
factors to also change? For instance, isn't European colonialism responsible
for both the larger number of diseases the explorers had been carrying, but
also the higher herd immunity? And that the native's relative isolation led
them to be more exposed when confronted with foreign cultures?

I guess what I'm asking is, isn't this a little bit of a chicken/egg
situation? If the natives had been more aggressive in expansion, they may have
had a higher exposure rate to other cultures and diseases and thereby a higher
immunity to it as well as leading to more genetic diversity, and possibly
having reached Europe first?

I guess the way I read your comment was implying that history could have
_easily_ been different (which you may or may not actually be stating), but
the number of factors (genetic/cultural temperament, geology, etc) all have to
line up over such a long period so as to basically be a fundamentally
different world history than what has transpired, both before and after the
actual colonisation period.

I overall agree with your point, that it was a large factor in the
colonisation of the Americas, but even that aspect was far more determined or
influenced by a huge range of factors that co-mingle into the history we know
(and largely left to random natural processes and historical fiat).

I'm probably being overly pedantic (it is Saturday night on HN after all ;)),
but I guess your statement read similarly to other "history-could-be-
different" thought experiments, but seem fundamentally different (I'm
contrasting that to the most common experiments, situations like the TV show
High Castle and what if Germany won the war, or what if JFK hadn't been
assasinated, etc).

Again, I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just following a mental thread of what
would be needed in order for that change to be possible. Having written and
read all that, at the very least, I was assuming something that's probably
different than what you're actually saying.

Your comment does make me wonder about some of the other accounts of European
history where the Romans had a harder time invading (parts of Brittania, for
example) where the cultures were written off as barbarian and completely
deranged or had large myths associated with them, if disease played some part
in the comparable success/failure of colonisation for those areas and the
coloring of Western history in general.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
The best theory I’ve seen goes as follows. Humans the world over have
domesticated like a dozen beasts of burden [1]. Ever. Most of those animals
are in the Old World. (The New World just had llamas.)

Domesticated beasts of burden mean (a) higher productivity, _i.e._ cities
_i.e._ proximity between people and (b) proximity between people and animals.
The latter provides a vector for novel diseases to form. The former provides a
vector for them to spread.

The boost to productivity, meanwhile, meant the Old World had the resources to
venture out. It’s more challenging to bootstrap a complex technological
society with just alpaca.

[1] [https://www.thoughtco.com/animal-domestication-table-
dates-p...](https://www.thoughtco.com/animal-domestication-table-dates-
places-170675)

~~~
natecavanaugh
I can definitely see how those innate technological advantages can stack up,
and it's definitely a good theory. I can't think of anything that couldn't be
explained by it, though I still believe there were a number of other factors
working in tandem with the domestication of animals (I am generally curious as
to why horses became extinct in North America as well as the general lack of
native domesticated mammals, if there is any known reason for it; the climate
seems well suited for them to thrive, but perhaps the size of the continent
and it's general isolation didn't contribute to the selective pressures that
benefited Eurasia, I'm just speculating outloud).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America_

“The causes of [North American horses’] extinction have been debated. Given
the suddenness of the event and because these mammals had been flourishing for
millions of years previously, something quite unusual must have happened. The
first main hypothesis attributes extinction to climate change. For example, in
Alaska, beginning approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic
of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with
unpalatable plants. However, it has been proposed that the steppe-tundra
vegetation transition in Beringia may have been a consequence, rather than a
cause, of the extinction of megafaunal grazers.

The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of
native prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous
with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big
game-hunting Clovis culture. Several studies have indicated humans probably
arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of
horses” [1].

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States)

------
jcims
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
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
Indeed!! We’re closer than we have ever been, and that trend is likely to
continue.

~~~
walterbell
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 ...?

------
abrowne
Interesting timing soon after a review of a recent book about Cortés:
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-
of-c...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-cortes/)

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."

~~~
azborder
That entire review is ridiculous. So much bias and selective use of historical
information to suit the writer’s opinion.

~~~
throwaway37585
Be specific. As it stands, your comment says basically nothing. Think about it
from the perspective of a random reader who comes across your comment. How on
earth will they know what you're talking about?

------
walterbell
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)

~~~
fouc
Funny how saying an "art teacher" here leads to an automatic assumption that
she's just some highschool teacher or similar. Turns out she's a professor.

~~~
walterbell
At the time of her first visit to Palenque, she had a masters degree in Art
and was teaching Studio Art at the university, was not yet a professor, and
had no formal background in epigraphy. After her pioneering discoveries, she
went back to grad school and specialized in Latin American studies.

> _Still attending graduate school, Schele founded the Maya Hieroglyphic
> Workshop in Texas in 1977 which consisted of 21 consecutive seminars
> concerning Maya hieroglyphic writing and introduced more people intrigued by
> the Maya field than many other books from that time that were considered
> "popular".[6] Twenty years later, the workshop expanded into what is known
> as the Maya Meetings at Texas, and includes a symposium of research papers
> by major scholars and the Forum on Hieroglyphic Writing.

> By this time in her life, Schele realized her destiny as a Mayanist; she
> enrolled as a graduate student in Latin American Studies at the University
> of Texas shortly before resigning from her position at South Alabama.[7] She
> was awarded a Doctorate in Latin American studies by the University of Texas
> in 1980. She continued her teaching career there, in the department of
> Art/Art History. At the time of her death, she was the John D. Murchison
> Regents Professor of Art in the department._

------
zawerf
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
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
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.

------
75dvtwin
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
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
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.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I think that such self sacrifice among the Aztecs is very different to the
politically and militarily oriented sacrifices you mention.

The former has no reasonable or practical reasoning.

The later - does, as I think any service member will understand. Every mission
has some degree of likelihood that one will face death, some are just willing
to up the ante to . a much greater level. The belief in some kind of 'special
heaven' is not really the motivating force, it just kind of makes it easier to
do.

------
Mirioron
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
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sacrifice)

------
defen
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
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
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
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.

~~~
remarkEon
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
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?

~~~
sonnyblarney
The Europeans did not remotely come close to killing Central and South
Americans at the rate they killed themselves, moreover, the term 'rape' is not
a useful pejorative, as there were no real natural resources of value that
were removed from that area that would have affected the ability of the
aboriginals to live.

Gold was removed in vast quantities, but has only a commercial value to those
who have ascribed to it such arbitrary value. Otherwise it's just a pretty
rock.

Of course - the masses who died from imported disease notwithstanding.

~~~
tptacek
I meant "rape" as in "rape".

~~~
sonnyblarney
Well ... among the relatively small number of Europeans there around about
that time, there probably was rape, which is bad; though you do realize that
you're making this point in an article that is literally about the total,
systematic and full cultural integration of mass slavery, mass murder, mass
infanticide etc. by one group of aboriginals of their immediate aboriginal
neighbours, on a scale approaching modern holocaust?

In fact, given > 100 000 skulls in 'one find', and we know this behaviour was
common in the region over time, and that certainly not all skulls were
preserved ... we're talking easily into the millions of murders, putting this
'on par' with the holocaust. Added the fact this was hundreds of years ago
with a smaller population base than modern Europe, in relative terms, this
cultural mass murder surpasses the holocaust in relative terms. And done on
the basis of 'religion' to boot ...

~~~
tptacek
No, I think you've lost the plot of this subthread. I'm not making a
comparative argument about which civilization is better. I'm saying that
Cortes didn't rescue Central America so much as perpetrate a genocide on it.
We're talking about a movie, for what it's worth.

~~~
sonnyblarney
No, we're talking about historical (i.e. real) Cortez, which is evident from
your very own reference to his 'rape' which has nothing to do with the film
'Apocalypto'.

The reference to 'rape' I interpreted metaphorically, and you indicated you
meant it literally - which I don't think applies given the historical facts of
Aztecs, Cortez et. al. in real history ... whereas one could arguably use the
'rape' in the metaphorical sense and it would in fact apply within reason, at
least as a creative description.

Also, nobody has suggested Cortez was a great dude, rather, that he wasn't
part of a 'death cult' that pulled the beating hearts out of hundreds of
thousands of slaves, women, and children, and inserted straws for the gods to
drink blood, skinned them alive and wore their skin for good luck etc. ...
which is altogether another level of crazy. It requires a hefty dose of moral
equivalence to even try to equate regular colonization/conquest, which is the
most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far, with the 'death
cult' Aztec stuff, which doesn't really seem to have any real historical
parallel.

~~~
tptacek
You see the cliff your argument is falling off of, right? "The most common
type of geopolitical activity in history by far". My argument doesn't require
me to somehow justify human sacrifice, but yours has taken you to the brink of
rationalizing the genocide perpetrated by Cortés.

------
DoreenMichele
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
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
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.

~~~
achamayou
Sure, but even so they seem to have had domesticated turkeys and even
chickens. It’s not immediately obvious to me that the average pre-Columbian
South American would have had less meat (or protein) in their diet than the
equivalent European of the same era.

------
gjpr
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
"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.

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

------
adityapurwa
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
>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.

------
mexica123434
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.

------
User23
Tlaloc thirsts! Look do you want rain or not?

------
EngineerBetter
Blimey, humans are really odd.

------
swayvil
They must have been getting good results.

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

------
coding123
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.

~~~
coginawheel
Do you believe all other forms of life have souls?

I'm curious because you made the vegetarian and vegan argument which I always
find interesting. I was raised Hindu (now atheist) and the religion has a
belief that all forms of life have a soul and have consciousness. As a
consequence of this you accept that in order to live, your life relies on
extinguishing other forms of life. I always find it weird that when people
talk about diet, animal rights, and souls, there is an arbitrary distinction
between animals and the rest of organism (plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.). The
concept of a soul is an abstract non-scientific belief, so given its an
abstract concept with no scientific basis, why do we make a distinction
between one form of life and another?

~~~
whatshisface
Because I don't want to be eaten if I become mentally disabled in an accident,
but I want to eat things that could perform equivalently on some tests.

~~~
coginawheel
I don't understand your comment. Can you explain further?

~~~
DoreenMichele
In the west, the generally accepted public narrative is that only humans have
souls, not other organisms. And whether or not it is acceptable to eat
something is frequently more or less tied to _intelligence._

I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan
moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but
eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul"
so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior
from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are
some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing
war, etc.)

But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a
better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have
brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem
to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad
thing.

If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is
morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It
is one of my objections to such framing.

~~~
michaelmrose
There is no reason to believe anything that would be described as a soul
exists. Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems
including plants, animals, and us.

Not being able to distinguish eating an orange, a chicken, a human, a human in
a vegetative state etc is just a failure of analysis.

There is no moral dimension to eating an orange and we don't eat people even
when their brain is irretrievably ruined out of inherent disgust,desire not to
catch a disease, and moral respect for those they may have left behind.

Eating animals is legitimately complicated. We probably shouldn't do it any
more

~~~
sonnyblarney
" Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including
plants, animals, and us."

I'm sorry, but I fully disagree, please see my note above.

This is a materialist view that presupposes that there is only matter/energy
and laws that govern it - and only with that (unproven) presupposition first
in place, can anything such as you have described be 'logically inferred'.

For example - you mention 'morality' \- from the purely physical perspective,
you are merely a random wave form, there can be no intelligence, experience,
consciousness - let alone morality from that perspective.

It is considerably logical that our current version of materialism is a very
helpful tool for understanding some material aspects of the universe, but that
by it's own definition is not very useful in terms of understanding life
itself.

Materialism is like a ruler we can use to measure stuff. But it gives us
little information on 'who is using the ruler'.

'Soul' or 'spirit' or whatever - are the words that we use to crudely describe
that which seems to otherwise differentiate life from other stuff, beyond
merely 'complexity'.

~~~
michaelmrose
Although we have been thinking about the matter for at least 12000 years we
have no reasonable theory for things that aren't matter or energy that isn't
hand waving and nonsense. The most prevalent current theories are
extrapolations from what goat herds who believed illnesses and earthquakes
were caused by evil spirits.

As an example most people would agree that chemistry is just applied physics
but most people don't do substantial chemistry by simulating all the particles
involved not because they believe that chemicals are somehow magical in a way
that isn't capturable by physics but because its challenging and intractable.

Further if we did arrive at some theory that described qualities and entities
not presently qualified by physics those things including souls would become
part of the universe because the term universe grows to encompass everything
we presently understand.

The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of
matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist.

It would of course be truly shocking if a heretofore incompressible aspect of
the universe just happened to mirror thousands of years of superstition.

It would be like if we travelled to another star system and found its denizens
were the cast of Harry Potter complete with billions of years of history
culminating with a multipart war against Voldemorte.

If you want to posit things out of scope of present understanding you ought to
provide some support for them which is notably absent from the above hand
waving.

I await an interesting reply but fear it will merely be a critique of my small
minded instance that debates consist of facts and arguments.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I think you missed my argument.

Your specific frame of reference is called 'scientific materialism', it's been
around since the Enlightenment, and like any metaphysical frame of reference,
it requires it's own basic assumptions. For example: "The universe is made of
this stuff we call matter and energy and those behave according to a specific
set of laws". This is unproven, unverifiable etc.. (By the way, you snuck one
in there 'information' \- which is an abstraction).

It's a useful tool, but it has some problems.

For example - in the context of scientific materialism - we cannot even be
'alive', let alone have 'intelligence' or have 'morality' if we are merely a
bag of randomness. A bag of random particles in the Universe must be random at
every level.

Here's a paradox for you: "prove to me that you are alive". Basically, you
can't. Life is the most important thing there is, and yet we don't even know
what we is. If an alien being made of metal parts landed and 'asked for our
leader' we'd have a hard time determining whether it was 'life' or not.

Our entire civilization and existence is framed around the concept of life,
and of what is not life.

FYI - this 'gaping hole' in Materialism has given rise to kind of a new field
called 'Emergence' which is the beginning of the materialists journey to try
to understand how complicated interesting things seem to arise from simpler
ones - though the field has no answers, the point is good because it
recognizes the 'hole' I mention.

"The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of
matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist."

Not really. Humans understood that gravity existed, or how it worked very
crudely, and dealt with it ... for thousands of years before we even had a
word for it, or were able to characterize it rationally in any way.

We have a rough ways of grasping issues while be develop better tools.

So - I did not indicate anything to validate thousands of years of specific
superstitions (chemical processes, or magical cures etc.). But the fact that
there are words for 'Spirit' 'Soul' or 'Animus' etc. which have developed
independently across cultures over various civilizations is a pretty strong
reason to indicate that 'something interesting is going on there'.

It's funny because when one steps back for the very specific and narrow view
of Materialism, it's an easy concept, it's just that most people are
conditioned to narrowly accept current interpretations of 'energy, matter'
etc. as 'Truth' that it's hard to consider another view.

The 'hand waiving' is made by those that simply make up and invent premises
such as 'The Universe Is Made Of Matter and Energy and Behaves According to
Mathematically Describable Laws" \- which is unproven and cannot be proven -
and then pass it of as an incontestable fact, and then derive all of their
arguments based on this supposition ... especially when this definition of the
Universe literally denies the very existence of life.

Scientific Materialism was invented by humans do describe: the material. It
should be no surprise that it starts to fail when we apply it to other, more
existential concepts.

Science is not Truth. It's just a tool, an interpretation. That's it.

~~~
michaelmrose
It doesn't deny life it simply lacks the tools to fully describe life in the
same way that someone who has discovered numbers addition and subtraction
lacks the tools to fully understand algebra.

------
ourmandave
Jeez, and I thought our immigration policies were harsh.

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

------
partycoder
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
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
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
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
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
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.

