Ritual Human Sacrifice In Mesoamerica

This book examines Maya sacrifice and related posthumous body manipulation. The editors bring together an international group of contributors from the area studied: archaeologists as well as anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, art historians and bioarchaeologists. This interdisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive perspective on these sites as well as the material culture and biological evidence found there

This edited volume addresses the environmental and cultural underpinnings of the kind of social conflict that spawned the origins and elaboration of ritualized human and animal sacrifice in Mesoamerica. The chapters variously document the place of cultural evolution and social complexity in the origins and elaboration of ritual human sacrifice, cannibalism, and trophy-taking across a broad spectrum of Mesoamerican cultural and social contexts that first saw the light of day before 2600 BCE, and rapidly developed and proliferated across the Mesoamerican world in the centuries to follow. They study the developments in sacrifice rituals through the centuries into the first millennium CE, when the Mexica Aztec and their allies had elevated ritual human sacrifice such that they produced a plethora of sacrificial acts, modes and manners of death, and associated deities to articulate the necro-cultures and blood-tribute of the times. The chapters further study present-day rites of Amerindian communities from throughout Mesoamerica that include paying homage to the deities of earth and sky through sacrifice and consumption of animal surrogates. The interdisciplinary effort undertaken by this international cadre of scientists, including anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, iconographers, and religious studies experts provides a particularly rich forum for launching an interrogation into the role of conflict, environment, and social complexity in the emergence and persistence of ritual violence and human sacrifice in the Mesoamerican world.

Illuminates the complexities of Aztec life. Readers meet a people highly skilled in sculpture, astronomy, city planning, poetry, and philosophy, who were also profoundly committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife and through warfare.

At an excavation of the Great Aztec Temple in Mexico City, amid carvings of skulls and a dismembered warrior goddess, David Carrasco stood before a container filled with the decorated bones of infants and children. It was the site of a massive human sacrifice, and for Carrasco the center of fiercely provocative questions: If ritual violence against humans was a profound necessity for the Aztecs in their capital city, is it central to the construction of social order and the authority of city states? Is civilization built on violence? In City of Sacrifice,Carrasco chronicles the fascinating story of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, investigating Aztec religious practices and demonstrating that religious violence was integral to urbanization; the city itself was a temple to the gods. That Mexico City, the largest city on earth, was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, is a point Carrasco poignantly considers in his comparison of urban life from antiquity to modernity. Majestic in scope, City of Sacrifice illuminates not only the rich history of a major Meso american city but also the inseparability of two passionate human impulses: urbanization and religious engagement. It has much to tell us about many familiar events in our own time, from suicide bombings in Tel Aviv to rape and murder in the Balkans.

Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.

"Exploring the intersection of spirituality and materiality, Mesoamerican Ritual Economy will be of interest to all scholars studying how worldview and belief motivate economic behavior."--Jacket.