Primary Sources: Mexica Sacrifices
As we were studying Mexica history in Mesoamerica it was interesting to see how scholars depending on what sources they used came up with different conclusions about Mexica sacrifices: Many were sacrificed, Some were sacrificed, or no sacrifices were the conclusions. All of these people had one thing in common: humans were killed. However Tlapoyawa has a theory that they killed for a different cause: capital punishment, whereas others guess it was sacrifice related to their religion. I can’t deny that all of these were convincing to me and it helped me understand more after reading them all. In our first paper Harner primarily uses the journals of Hernan Cortez as evidence for his theory. He also used the artwork from codex left behind to back up his ideas of Mexica sacrifices. However his evidence mainly relies on the written documents from the Spanish Conquistadors: this is problematic because the Spanish were taking over the Aztecs around this time and putting the Aztecs into slavery. It is then that we need to stand back and ask ourselves questions. Were the Spanish overly dramatic about the Aztec culture regarding sacrifices to justify their own actions? Were the Spanish biased and could have changed their story for their own gain? Diaz wrote the book forty years after his encounter with the Aztecs which makes it more unreliable than other primary sources. Harner also has another problem in his theory: the number of people sacrificed. he estimated that 80,000 humans were sacrificed yearly in the capital alone. However another scholar Anawalt, points out that the city of Tenochtitlan had 200,000 people total living there which would mean that half of the population of the biggest city in Mesoamerica would be killed every year.
So far from what we have excavated from the 2015 dig, archeologists found 603 skulls: far from the estimated 80,000. We have found that there are human skulls but this still lacks enough evidence for us to really know if they sacrificed.
Anawalt uses in her essay the primary sources of structures left behind: Idols, architecture, artwork, and human remains. but people are still questioning the reality of human sacrifices in Mesoamerica. What would help us further in our investigations is to find more physical evidence of human sacrifices taking place. Broken ribs would point to the artwork of the Aztecs: breaking open the chest to retrieve the heart. If they could find broken ribs or other marks on bones, it would go a long way to show human sacrifices existed.