I get the feeling every now and then that academics and journalists place a low value on human life, thinking of it as no more precious than a commodity to be depleted and replenished as necessary.
That is certainly the impression I get this week from reading National Public Radio’s astonishingly gentle take on Aztecan human sacrifice. That is not hyperbole. The publicly funded newsgroup indeed published an article this week downplaying the Aztecs’ practice of mass human slaughter.
The NPR report, titled “500 Years Later, The Spanish Conquest Of Mexico Is Still Being Debated,” centers on efforts by the director of the urban archaeology program at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, Raul Barrera Rodríguez, to excavate Aztecan ruins.
“In 2017, Barrera’s team uncovered the Huey Tzompantli, a tower of human skulls that was a monument to the Aztecs’ highest deity, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun,” the NPR report reads. “The conquistadors described a terrifying satanic sight. It was precisely the opposite for Aztecs.”
Barrera is quoted as saying, “It is important to understand the worldview of the Aztecs. The tzompantli was about giving life.”
Sure. If you say so.
The report continues, reading, “As Barrera explains, the Aztecs had deep, complex rituals around death. Aztecs believed their gods needed nourishment to survive and made them offerings of people and animals. For example, offering warriors — primarily prisoners of war — ensured the sun would continue to shine and the Aztecs would be successful in war. The Spanish didn’t see it that way [emphasis added].”
I am sorry, what?
Why not just call the Aztec priests “austere religious scholars” and be done with it already? If you can believe it, NPR is not alone in making allowances for Aztecan human sacrifice because different cultures, different customs. A 2018 Science magazine article did exactly the same thing, using the same dismissive language about, you know, ritual murders and all that.
So, for some background context, here is one account of what the conquistadors found when they first came to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (via a 2005 report by the LA Times):
[…]
Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced, stoned, crushed, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples. Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
[…]
[A]t 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,” Velez Saldana said. “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 don’t 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 sitting around eating, as the god of death looks on.
“We have found cooking dishes just like that,” said archeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. “And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones.” Researchers don’t know if those remains were cannibalized.
In 2002, government archeologist Juan Alberto Roman Berrelleza announced the results of forensic testing on the bones of 42 children, mostly boys around age 6, sacrificed at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor, the Aztecs’ main religious site, during a drought.
All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry.
“It was considered a good omen if they cried a lot at the time of sacrifice,” which was probably done by slitting their throats, Roman Berrelleza said.
Then there is what Reuters reported in 2017:
The tower is believed to form part of the Huey Tzompantli, a massive array of skulls that struck fear into the Spanish conquistadores when they captured the city under Hernan Cortes, and mentioned the structure in contemporary accounts.
Historians relate how the severed heads of captured warriors adorned tzompantli, or skull racks, found in a number of Mesoamerican cultures before the Spanish conquest.
But the archaeological dig in the bowels of old Mexico City that began in 2015 suggests that picture was not complete.
“We were expecting just men, obviously young men, as warriors would be, and the thing about the women and children is that you’d think they wouldn’t be going to war,” said Rodrigo Bolanos, a biological anthropologist investigating the find.
Historian Tim Stanley wrote later in 2011 that, “When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days. That is 21,000 sacrifices per day. I am not even mad about this — I am impressed. They didn’t even kill that many people at Auschwitz on the average day.
As many reasons as the invading colonialists have to be ashamed, that they wiped a genocidal death cult off the planet is not one of them.
