Why Learn This History Stuff Anyway?

In an attempt to remain objective in this brief essay, I will not overlook accounts of human sacrifice by the Aztecs. Indeed these atrocities were committed by the Aztecs on some captured male prisoners. The degree to which these operations were carried out is debated by historians. Some estimates suggest that the Aztecs sacrificed up to 20,000 captives a year. Stannard reports that some modern scholars view the number of 20,000 to be greatly exaggerated as a result of conquering interest. Whatever the case may be, Stannard quotes Pedro de Cieza de Leon, a conquistador in 1553, as saying: "These and other things are the testimony the Spaniards raise against these Indians. . . endeavoring by these things we tell of them to hide our own shortcomings and justify the ill treatment they have suffered at our hands. . . I am not saying that they did not make sacrifices. . . but it was not as it was told." Stannard also notes that: ". . . in the siege of Tenochtitlan the invading Spaniards killed twice that many people in a single day including (unlike Aztec sacrifice) enormous numbers of innocent women, children, and the aged."

1) The Aztec empire reigned for only a few decades. It wasn't representative of thousands of years of Mesoamerican history.

2) The Mesoamericans in El Dorado weren't Aztecs but rather a mishmash of Mesoamerican cultures. Equating all Mesoamericans with Aztecs is patently false.

3) The Spaniards eventually killed more Mesoamericans than all the Aztec sacrifices combined. If numbers are the guideline, the two sides were not morally equivalent.

MEChA is just your basic Latino college students group. There are chapters at every school I've attended, UT at San Antonio, Purdue, and ASU. They did "radical" things like collect Toys For Tots, canned goods, and lobby the university for more funding for Mexican-American Studies. Mildly reformist at best. My guess would be the "news" people found a few students within one chapter they could quote out of context.

The Mexica movement is more along the lines of Mexican kids with Indian ancestry trying to recover their Indian heritage. Some of what they say is over romanticized or vague, but they did win the respect of at least a few Natives I know of. Mikey Zamora is one of the Mexica people, and he works on the mascot issue. The Native rapper Litefoot also had some links to the Mexica movement on his website last time I looked at it a few years ago.

As both a member of the invading army and a proud son of Mexican-hating Orange County, I can testify that, without a doubt, MEChA is harmless.

Sure, the organization's founding documents, the Plan de Santa Barbara and the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, call for a Chicano homeland. But few members take these hilariously dated relics of the 1960s seriously, if they even bother to read them. Little of the modern-day MEChA remains separatist, other than the occasional Che-spouting junior and a few cute mestizas with Aztec names like Citlali who sport Frida ponytails, black-frame glasses and Chuck Taylor high-tops.

MEChA's primary objectives are not secessionist but educational (get as many Latino high schoolers into the universities as possible and help them stay there) and cultural. For many Mexican American students, MEChA is their family by proxy, a support network for those of us who were the first in our families to graduate from high school, let alone college.

Evidence May Back Human Sacrifice Claims

By Mark Stevenson
Associated Press
posted: 23 January 2005
06:40 pm ET

MEXICO CITY (AP) — It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.

Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.

For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures, others argued that sacrifices were largely confined to captured warriors, while 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," said archaeologist Leonardo Lopez Lujan. He said, "some 'pro-Indian' currents had always denied this had happened. They said the texts must be lying."

The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.

But there is no longer as 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, clawed, sliced to death, 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.

"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 who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcher-like cut marks.

In December, at an excavation in an Aztec-era community in Ecatepec, just north of Mexico City, archaeologist 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."

While 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 archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa. "And, next to some full skeletons, we found some incomplete, segmented human bones." However, researchers don't know whether those remains were cannibalized.

In 2002, government archaeologist 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 Aztec's 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.

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 the late 19th and early 20th century, "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico," Stuart wrote. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya."

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

Some Spanish-era texts have yet to be corroborated with physical remains. They describe Aztec priests sacrificing children and adults by sealing them in caves or drowning them. But the assumption now is that the texts appear trustworthy, said Lopez Lujan, who also works at the Templo Mayor site.

For Lopez Lujan, confirmation has come in the form of advanced chemical tests on the stucco floors of Aztec temples, which were found to have been soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.

"It's now a question of quantity," said Lopez Lujan, who thinks the Spaniards — and Indian picture-book scribes working under their control — exaggerated the number of sacrifice victims, claiming in one case that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.

"We're not finding anywhere near that ... even if we added some zeros," Lopez Lujan said.

Researchers have largely discarded the old theory that sacrifice and cannibalism were motivated by a protein shortage in the Aztec diet, though some still believe it may have been a method of population control.

Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed.

"It is really very difficult for us to conceive," Pijoan said of the sacrifices. "It was almost an honor for them."

SCIENCE FILE

Aztecs Tortured, Ate Spaniards, Bones Show
Evidence of capture and rituals is unearthed at a site near Mexico City.

From Reuters

August 26, 2006

CALPULALPAN, Mexico — Skeletons found at an archeological site show that Aztecs captured, sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

The condition of skulls and bones from the Tecuaque site east of Mexico City offers evidence that about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say.

The findings support accounts of Aztecs capturing and killing a caravan led by Spanish conquistadors in revenge for the murder of Cacamatzin, king of the Aztec city of Texcoco. Experts said the discovery proved that some Aztecs did resist the conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes before they attacked the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

History books say many indigenous Mexicans initially welcomed the white-skinned horsemen, thinking they were returning gods, but turned against them once they tried to take over the Aztec seat of power in a conflict that ended in 1521.

"This is the first place that has so much evidence there was resistance to the conquest," said archeologist Enrique Martinez, director of the dig here. "It shows it wasn't all submission."

The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods, Martinez said.

"It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected," Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.

The priests and town elders sometimes ate their victims' hearts or cooked flesh from their arms and legs, Martinez said. Knife cuts and even teeth marks on the bones show which ones had meat stripped off to be eaten, he said.

In Aztec times, the site was called Zultepec, a town of white-stucco temples and homes where 5,000 people grew maize and beans. Upon hearing of the massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque — "where people were eaten" in the indigenous Nahuatl language — and sent an army to wipe out its people.

When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims' possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewelry for archeologists.

"They hid all the evidence," Martinez said. "Thanks to that act, we have been allowed to discover a chapter we were unaware of in the conquest of Mexico."