Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital • Hacker News Board

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#81

Post by scarecrowbob » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #63

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 populatio…

This is kind of a neat idea.

Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#82

Post by Gibbon1 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #65

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…

> 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.

When I think about that I have trouble with the idea that Cortez would have come up with THAT if he was trying to slander the Mesoamerican ruling class. As he would have had no cultural references to draw on.

> students should understand that these incidents were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs.

I keep thinking that to Mesoamerican peasants Catholicism was probably least offensive thing about the Spanish.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#83

Post by jack9 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

ggm wrote: post #80

5DFractalTetris wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.

Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.

It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#84

Post by pgrad » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #15

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=Ag5fGFwWwBU She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium abou…

>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.

Says who?

>She was invited by NASA to speak at a symposium about alien civilizations.

Source?

Do you want me to buy a book too?

Edit: OK, the way you wrote your post got my skepticism alarm blaring. I was thinking you were talking about some ancient aliens insanity, but that wasn't your point at all. I apologize for the confrontational post.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#85

Post by achamayou » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #49

achamayou wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#86

Post by mike00632 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

topspin wrote: post #72

coding123 wrote: post #20

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 s…

> but more importantly start seeing animals as other beings with souls Let's stipulate that non-human animals have a "soul," whatever you believe a soul to be. How to you judge the soul of, say, a raccoon; a creature than has been called the psychopath of the animal world? A raccoon is never happier than when it's slaughtering a nest full of cute, helpless babies. Red-tailed hawks are such a menace to other species t…

Raccoons don't have the capacity for moral judgement but humans do. It doesn't make sense to think of a raccoon's actions as a part of a moral framework but it does for humans. In fact, we already do. What vegans/vegetarians are doing is extending that logic to be more consistent in our diet.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#87

Post by mike00632 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #36

coginawheel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

" they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains..."

I'm afraid this is a strawman argument. Most vegans/vegetarians choose to spare other animals based on their capacity to suffer.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#88

Post by mike00632 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #51

azborder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you’re advocating stretching the definition of the term to support your own bias, when it has a pretty clear meaning.

[flagged]

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.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#89

Post by beaconstudios » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

jack9 wrote: post #83

ggm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.

It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.

I disagree. What god is capital punishment meant to appease? It's supposedly there for people who are too dangerous to keep alive right? Human sacrifice seems to me like it was meant to bring better harvests or otherwise give the illusion of controlling a chaotic/random natural process.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#90

Post by elboru » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #48

1123581321 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would read about the inquisitions first. The Spanish Inquisition killed about 5,000 as an execution of the civil law, not a religious ritual. The law was bad, but the interrogations were in an attempt to only censure or punish the “guilty,” and to the correct degree. It’s quite a different situation. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

[flagged]

You have a really cartoonish view on this. They were not killed because it made God angry. You have to put context on it.

You have to understand that religion was really important (maybe the most important thing) for the people of that period, and you have to know that their religion was threatened for centuries inside their own borders, you have to know about "La reconquista".

In a time of period were your territory was just regained from Moors after centuries of occupation and threatens to your life and beliefs. The only logical move was to identify those who were still Moors in the shadows, from their point of view they were the remains of the invaders they were still dangerous.

You have to know about the kind of punishments for the law breakers (not only religion laws) on that period of time, you have to know that the inquisition was the organization that investigated the cases to identify those who were false conversions (those who were still a threaten from their point of view), then when someone was found guilty for breaking their laws the state was responsable for imparting justice, their justice is very different from today's justice, we have learned a lot, but you can't properly understand their actions if you don't understand the context.