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Important rituals such as the dedication of major building projects or the enthronement of a new ruler required a human sacrificial offering. The sacrifice of an enemy king was the most prized offering, and such a sacrifice involved the decapitation of the captive ruler in a ritual reenactment of the decapitation of the Maya maize god by the Maya death gods. [1]
Bancroft notes: "An event which in Mexico would be the death-signal to a hecatomb of human victims would in Yucatán be celebrated by the death of a spotted dog."(p. 704) But mounting archeological evidence has for many decades now supported the chroniclers' contention that human sacrifice was far from unknown in Maya society.
The Mexica of the Aztec period are perhaps the most widely studied of the ancient Mesoamerican peoples. While most pre-Columbian historians believe that ritual cannibalism took place in the context of human sacrifices, they do not support Harris' thesis that human flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet.
The ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula has long been associated with human sacrifice, with hundreds of bones unearthed from temples, a sacred sinkhole and other ...
In 1967, an underground cistern known as a chultun was discovered near a sacred body of water at Chichen Itza, an important ancient Maya city on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Skeletal remains of ...
Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure, spirits of dead ancestors or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in ...
The children, found near the ancient ruins of the Toltec capital of Tula, had been decapitated. The remains have been dated to AD 950 to 1150. "To try and explain why there are 24 bodies grouped in the same place, well, the only way is to think that there was a human sacrifice", archaeologist Luis Gamboa said. [6]
Hidden under an ancient Mayan building in Mexico, archaeologists discovered a compartment that was used to hold rainwater — or something more sinister. ... Then, as the researchers reached the ...