- 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.
-
- © Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
-
- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
|
