The human sacrifice problem
Back in 2018, I published one of my favorite feature stories, about the discovery of Tenochtitlan’s tzompantli in downtown Mexico City. Tzompantlis, or racks of skulls, have been found in many places in Mesoamerica, but the one in the Aztec capital appears to have taken the tradition to a unusually large scale. Models made by the team of archaeologists who excavated it suggest it was about the size of a basketball court, with the rows of skulls reaching higher than the hoops would be. Conventional wisdom holds that the skulls on the tzompantli belonged to sacrifice victims, the vast majority of whom were war captives.
I wanted to center two perspectives in my story: First, that of the archaeologists of Mexico City’s Urban Archaeology Project, who routinely make incredible discoveries doing salvage work in what was once the sacred core of Tenochtitlan; and second, that of the Mexica, the founders of Tenochtitlan and principal leaders of the Aztec empire, who built the tzompantli as a symbol of religious renewal and political power. I felt strongly we didn’t need to hear much from the Spanish invaders who destroyed it. They’re in there a little, mostly because for a while archaeologists wondered if Cortés and his crew hadn’t just invented the existence of a gigantic rack of skulls as part of their conquest propaganda. It seemed like the kind of thing a bunch of ethnocentric religious fundamentalists would do.
The discovery of the skulls showed the conquistadors didn’t make it up, but it didn’t show they were right about what the tzompantli meant. The tzompantli showed that the Mexica, like every empire, sanctioned certain forms of state violence as a way to demonstrate and enforce their political power. It showed that they, like countless other cultures throughout history, believed in a religion in which human life was the most important offering one could make. It showed that they, like every other complex society, had rules about warfare, violence, and killing—which conflicted with the rules of war European cultures had developed and would soon impose on the Americas. The tzompantli, and human sacrifice in general, did not show that the Mexica were “barbarians” who deserved to be crushed by Spanish invaders and their righteous Catholic faith (which obviously has no relation to human sacrifice or political/religious executions at all. No way, definitely not). But that has been the line from Cortés onward, and its point has always been to defamiliarize and dehumanize the Mexica and other Mesoamerican Indigenous people in order to justify any and all sorts of violence against them.
Five hundred years later, it’s still working. After my story was published, I was immediately deluged by comments calling it “spine-tingling” and saying, apparently genuinely, that it made them rethink the conquest as a triumph of human dignity and morality. I mean, 🤮. This was some nasty, racist rhetoric people were pulling out of a story I strived to make anything but. I can see now the ways I failed at that, the ways I let exoticism and sensationalism seep in (including but not limited to the headline!), and the ways the conventions of both journalism and archaeology pushed me toward those choices and made them seem like the right ones. I still love a lot of things about my story, but clearly, I could have done better.
I was still on Twitter then, and I tweeted some things about the importance of trying to understand how the Mexica and their subjects thought about human sacrifice, rather than imposing our very modern moral revulsion on them. These thoughts, made for an assumed audience of academics and legitimately curious readers, somehow made their way down the dark paths of the internet and into the hands of infamous right-wing troll Ben Shapiro. What followed was a textbook case of context collapse and my only experience of “morally motivated networked harassment.” I don’t have very much to say about it, since I basically logged off as soon as it started and never had cause to worry the culture warriors would find me in real life or that their attack would result in professional consequences. (If anything, the whole episode may have slightly improved my reputation among a crucial subset of my audience: terminally online anthropologists.) The capstone of my minor ordeal was an email from a friend who happened to be driving through rural Virginia at the time, telling me I had been denounced by name on Christian radio.
I wouldn’t call being targeted by a minor skirmish of the Republican culture war traumatic, and I had the privilege of mostly laughing it off. I’m actually kind of glad it happened, because it showed me just how ingrained the colonial view of the Aztec empire remains, and just how emotionally attached people are to it. People who are invested in not thinking too hard about why the world looks the way it does need it to be true. Because if the Mexica weren’t gruesomely violent tyrants who deserved to be overthrown, then what does their conquest and colonization mean? Could it be that it was actually the Spanish, the Europeans, the settler colonialists whom so many of us (including me!) owe our histories and existence to, who practiced a kind of violence that truly devalued human life? Could it be that settler colonial nation-states rest on such a shallow and obviously false understanding of history that anyone who dares to question their basic assumptions must be immediately attacked and contained?1 Could it be that the conquest was never justified or inevitable, and the world as we understand it is based on a lie so big we can barely comprehend its scope? Could it be that we—the descendants of European colonists and the inheritors of their philosophy, religion, and moral logic—are the real villains of the story?
You know the answer, and I believe, deep down, the Twitter trolls do to. That’s why they attack, because the colonial worldview is so fragile that it will crumble unless its violence and injustices are continually reenacted and reinforced. I’m writing about the Mexica again, this time in my book, and I now know I can’t expect readers to extend them the courtesy of trying to understand them on their own terms—the way we so naturally do with, say, Elizabethan England, a state that routinely staged public ceremonies in which people who questioned the dominant religion were burned alive in front of ecstatic crowds. I know I can’t try to ignore or circumvent the colonial lens through which so many of us learned to see the world, as I did in my feature. I have to point it out, and invite people to step away from it. It might be uncomfortable, even painful, and it’s the work of a lifetime for a person like me. None of us can change the past, but we can learn to see it more clearly.
Further reading
I’ve read about 100 books about the Aztecs, the conquest, and the aftermath at this point. These are just a few of the most accessible non-academic works. If you want more, or have specific questions/areas of interest, reply to this email or leave a comment and I’ll send you a personalized list!
For an exploration of how and why human sacrifice became such a powerful rhetorical weapon in colonialism’s arsenal, I recommend When Montezuma Met Cortés by Matthew Restall. His earlier Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest remains a crucial read as well. Restall prefers not to use the term “human sacrifice” at all and instead refers to what the Mexica did as “public executions.” I’m not sure I can move so fully away from how archaeologists see the practice in my work, but I’ve found it tremendously useful to think about what I like about using “public executions” and what I don’t.
For an extremely readable and fascinating history of the Aztecs, from their migration to the Valley of Mexico to several generations post-conquest, check out Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend. Her primary sources, the pre-and post-conquest historical annals written in Nahuatl, are incredibly rich, and it’s a gift to have their stories and perspectives made so accessible to a wide audience. The book contains an unfortunate number of references to the work of Jared Diamond, perhaps the 21st century’s leading colonial apologist and my sworn enemy, but just assume the opposite of what he says is true and you’ll be fine.
If you read Spanish, ¿Quién Conquistó México? by Federico Navarrete is an astute examination of many conquest myths and how they continue to drive injustice and inequality today. In general, I would say the “Aztec barbarians” image has far more purchase outside of Mexico than it does within it, but the absolutely hysterical elite backlash to things like the current government requesting an official apology from Spain and the Vatican and renaming the “Noche Triste” (Sad Night, when the Spanish and their allies were driven out of Tenochtitlan) as the “Noche Victoriosa” (Victorious Night, centering the Mexica’s perspective) shows just how threatening it can be when a version of history that justifies the current social order is questioned.
Since I’m white, my ideas were attacked and my body was never at risk. That’s not the case for Indigenous people and communities, for whom colonial violence remains a visceral, physical reality.