Talk:Human sacrifice in pre-Columbian cultures

A most reliable source
Further to what I said a couple of days ago in Talk:Human sacrifice in Aztec culture.

El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana published in 2010 by both the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, contains a chapter, “El papel de los infantes en las prácticas sacrificiales mexicas” ("The role of the infants in the sacrificial practices of the Mexicas", pages 345-366) authored by Juan Alberto Román Berrelleza, that pretty much validates the data already gathered in this Wikipedia article.

Román-Berrelleza adds recent archeological discoveries such as the offerings containing skeletons of infants found in (1) what remains of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, (2) the temple Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl in Tlatelolco, and (3) beneath the cathedral of Mexico City:


 * (1) Forty-two skeletons of infants
 * (2) Forty-one sacrificed individuals of which 30 were infants
 * (3) Three skeletons of sacrificed infants

Román Berrelleza writes that such discoveries are “corroborando numerosos aspectos de las fuentes históricas”, that is, “corroborating various aspects of the historical sources”, meaning the 16th century Spanish chronicles (Román-Berrelleza mentions Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán).

Cesar Tort 03:28, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

El Sacrificio Humano chapter
The academic treatise El Sacrificio Humano en la Tradición Religiosa Mesoamericana includes a photo of a recent discovery of a child offering to Huitzilopochtli. See both the photo and the original quote in Spanish of El Sacrificio Humano of what I translate below here.

In an article of El Sacrificio Humano, “Huitzilopochtli and child sacrifice in the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan” (my translation) by Leonardo López Luján, Ximena Chávez Balderas, Norma Valentín and Aurora Montúfar (pages 367-394), the authors tell us:


 * Everything indicates that this deposit is the material expression of a mass sacrificial ceremony motivated by the devastating drought of year 1 Tochli, corresponding to our 1454 C.E. and reported in a number of Indian annals. The presence of the Offering 48 in the northwest corner of Temple fully agrees with the documentary sources of the 16th century (pages 367-368).


 * During such ceremonies [to Tláloc], subject to the calendar or performed in times of crisis, children were symbolically similar to the dwarfs and deformed assistants of rain, as their profuse tears shed when immolated served as a hopeful omen of abundant precipitation. The careful study recently published by Michel Graulich about human sacrifice among the Aztecs indicates that, usually, the chosen children were given away or sold by their parents…; little slaves offered by the lords and wealthy people; infants purchased out of town, or children of prisoners of war. There are indications, moreover, that the kings and lords to some extent responsible for the smooth running of the meteors destined their own offspring to the téhcatl during droughts or floods, or to get rich harvests (pages 368 & 370).


 * The taphonomic analysis


 * Numerous cut marks on the ribs of both sides of the rib cage, as well as perimortem fractures produced by the same cutting action… In our view, this body of evidence is sufficient to conclude that the child of Offering 111 died during a sacrificial ceremony in which his tiny heart was extracted (pages 377-378).


 * Child sacrifice, war and Huitzilopochtli


 * Not all child sacrifices were linked to the gods of rain and fertility. Some historical documents reveal that people who were in situations of adversity, or had lost their freedom, or had been suffering a terrible disease, promised to give their children in exchange for their salvation. In other cases, the life of infants was claimed just before the military confrontations (pages 381-382).

In the following pages the authors mention the Spanish chroniclers as complementary sources of what recent archeology has discovered; chroniclers and 16th century texts such as Francisco Lopez de Gómara, the “List of Coatepec and his party,” Antonio Tello [1567-1653], Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún.

I still have to figure out how to accommodate this info into the page.

Cesar Tort 20:56, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Changes made to Maya Culture
The Changes I made were to add a brief introduction to child sacrifice in Maya culture and to organize the evidence for child sacrifice into subheadings while rearranging the existing information into those subheadings TaylorMorgan64 (talk) 18:22, 19 April 2016 (UTC)TaylorMorgan64

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Discrepancy between title and content
The title of this article says "human sacrifice," but the body of the article pretty much only discusses child sacrifice, not human sacrifice writ large. Either the title should be changed to reflect this, or the article should be updated to include all human sacrifice, rather than just focusing on child sacrifice. Which option to go with? Aquaticonions (talk) 22:59, 4 August 2022 (UTC)