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

sciencemag.org

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

#261

Post by nyolfen »

Malarkey73 wrote: post #248
avn2109 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civiliza…

The article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly. I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The…

>You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery.

>It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.

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

#262

Post by nyolfen »

XalvinX wrote: post #247
75dvtwin wrote: post #140

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 warr…

How could they? It was just their job. One of my brother's college friends ended up as a USAF bomber pilot in Iraq and over some beers one night he described his job. It sounded much like a video game. On the screen where many small blips and his job was to try to hit the areas where they were most dense. What did the blips represent? "Each blip was a person." No indication beyond that. Could have been kids, women, o…

do you think his job was just to find conglomerations of random people and kill them?

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

#263

Post by nyolfen »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #41

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.…

>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.

the corn/maize/squash dietary kit was remarkably complete in nutrition (eg, all necessary amino acids/"complete protein"); it's one of the reasons that tenochtitlan was one of the most densely populated places on earth upon arrival of the spanish. this thesis is completely bunk.

in fact, cursory googling found this:

> In the late 1970s the anthropologist Michael Harner suggested that the Aztecs had resorted to large-scale, organized cannibalism to make up for a supposed protein deficiency in the diet. This idea gained limited support from some scholars, but has been shown to be based on unfounded assumptions about eating habits, agriculture and demographics, making it a highly unlikely scenario.[38]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_cuisine

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

#264

Post by duxup »

mirimir wrote: post #167
duxup wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone describing the practice intended to be role playing / speaking as an Aztecs....

It's not that they're role playing. It's that they're professionally neutral.

I'm talking about people on Twitter who might call the practice 'horrible', they're not role playing Aztecs and they aren't writing a paper.

To take issue with their description because they are not either of those things seems silly....or just a sort of academic trolling for attention.

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

#265

Post by sonnyblarney »

Cpoll wrote: post #250
sonnyblarney wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term 'sacrifice' is used in different contexts. A 'sacrifice' to a god for whatever reason is a literal sacrifice, talking about the 'cost of war' in terms of 'sacrifice' is a metaphor.

Only because we now know that human sacrifices don't please the gods and improve our fortunes. Otherwise, it breaks down in exactly the same way: We kill some children, but we're okay with that, because it will benefit us. If it's a metaphor, it can only be because there's no sacrifice at all, the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis.

"the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis"

This is absolutely false.

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

#266

Post by reitanqild »

lostlogin wrote: post #190
reitanqild wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Later, during the reign of terror they killed and tortured people based on non-religious or even anti religious beliefs. Yes, old Catholics did much wrong but can we stop this very unnuanced "religious people did it" and conc…

Apply that to the modern Catholic Church and it’s behaviour. I don’t you can claim it’s just related power, the institution is rotten.

Care to explain? No big fan ofthe Catholic Church, - they've been after people like me as well, -but my point is:

So has everyone else, so singling out them and pretending it is about "religion" or "the Catholics" is wrong.

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

#267

Post by stevenwoo »

booleandilemma wrote: post #136
stevenwoo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.”

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.

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

#268

Post by golergka »

spamizbad wrote: post #260
golergka wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far. Of course Aztecs didn't see this practice as evil - but why would we care? We have our own moral system, and I don't see any reason not to use it in this case.

> This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far. I mean, if we want to be morally objective... what does the war on terror's body count say about the United States relative to the Aztecs? We're 10x as evil?

It says nothing, because this variable is not enough to make any kind of moral judgement. In fact, I just had almost exactly the same discussion here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

azeotropic wrote: post #18

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 Molo…

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by ars »

dalbasal wrote: post #198
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread…

Also, the story of Isaac. That is quite literally a story about a custom of child sacrifice, with a later minute change of heart.

Abraham was very very high profile in his area. So everyone around him would have watched this whole story take place.

It wasn't a later minute change of hearth, it was basically a dramatic way to drive home the message DO NOT SACRIFICE humans!

It's got the "hook" "Abraham is going to sacrifice", to get everyone's attention. And then the powerful message "don't do that".

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