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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2005 
Rare Sacrificial Child Uncovered
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
| | The plot thickens after the latest discovery as researchers debate the accuracy of Spanish written accounts. |
Archaeologists at Mexico City's Templo Mayor ruins announced the discovery of a rare child sacrifice to the Aztec war god, a deity normally honored with the hearts or skulls of adult warriors.
Archaeologist Ximena Chávez said there was no reference to child sacrifices to the war god Huitzilopochtli in accounts written by the Spaniards after the 1521 Conquest, showing the need for exhaustive digs to discover more about the long-controversial subject.
Some researchers say the Spaniards exaggerated accounts of human sacrifices by the Aztecs to justify their own brutal conquest; others defend the old accounts, but archaeologists now say Mexico needs hard physical evidence to decide the truth.
"We are finding things here that writers of the earliest accounts did not mention, possibly because they were writing about things they didn't personally witness," said Chávez, of the National Institute of History and Anthropology.
"This child is unique," said Chávez, "because it is the first child dedicated to Huitzilopochtli." Warriors captured during battles with opposing cities were often sacrificed to the war god; in contrast, children have sometimes been found sacrificed to Tlaloc, the rain god.
The discovery announced Friday was also unusual because the child's body was found whole, and accompanied by whistles, collars, ankle bracelets of shells and copper bells details normally reserved for honorific burials.
Many sacrifice victims were decapitated or had their hearts ripped out, and their bodies dumped willy-nilly into pits.
Researchers are still working to determine with certainty the sex, age and cause of death of the child whose skeletal remains were found in the test trench.
What they do know is that some time around 1450, the child was killed in a sort of grim cornerstone ceremony intended to dedicate a new layer of building on one of Mexico City's main temples. The Aztecs added a new layer to their temples about once every 52 years.
Priests propped the child in a sitting position, his legs splayed out in front of him, and workers packed sand and clay around his body, which was then covered beneath a flight of stone temple steps.
The find came almost by accident last month, as archeologists dug a test trench at the edge of a temple on the crossroads of two major thoroughfares in the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, the name the Aztecs gave to the city they founded in 1325.
About a meter (yard) below the surface, they saw the top of a tiny skull, and began digging more slowly.
Carmen Pijoan, a prominent forensic anthropologist who did not participate in the dig, said that child sacrifices are sometimes found whole, but that it did appear unusual for a child to be sacrificed to the war god.
Chávez said the child's killing had to be understood in the context of Aztec beliefs.
"They saw this action of (human) sacrifice as a lifegiving activity," she said, noting they thought the deaths would bring rain, help crops and give life to the community.
Just as important, the excavations that began in 1978 at the Templo Mayor could help reveal the details about the practice of human sacrifice.
"Some said sacrifice didn't exist, others said it was carried out on a mass scale," Chávez said. "Neither of those positions were entirely right." She said archaeologists hoped to put together a large, interdisciplinary team to study this and other recent finds. "We hope to change a bit the concept of sacrifice and make knowledge about it more precise." In recent years archaeologists have found mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts of human sacrifices in substance, but which indicates that some Spanish accounts exaggerated the number of victims.
One Spanish writer, for example, claimed that 80,400 people were sacrificed during a few days at a temple inauguration in 1487. In contrast, digs have seldom yielded evidence of more than a few dozen victims at any one site.
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. |
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