Since the OP specified ‘pre-1850’, I’ll go with this: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-colonists-practice-scalping
(better or worse than smallpox blankets? you make the call…)
Thanks again, everyone; this has all been great.
Nava, I’ve already read Marco Polo’s Travels. Good fun. I found it amusing how the author kept trying to make a picaresque adventure story, but Marco wouldn’t let him 
mbh, thanks for the tip on the Moche, I’d never heard of them before. I’ll enjoy going through those cites in the Wiki article.
Ele the Stoic, thanks for the info - might you have any particular book/ebook recommendations on Mayan rituals and Ottoman slavery? Specific tips on reading about Spain would be appreciated too - I did a fair bit of reading on the Reconquista in university, but not much on the inquisition or oppression. (I read Spanish fluently, if that makes a difference)
I, too, would highly recommend Gary Jennings’s Aztec. Although a novel, it’s very well-researched and gives you a great, very entertaining look at Aztec society from top to bottom. Yes, it was in many ways a brutal culture, but Jennings makes the points that far fewer died in Aztec warfare than died in European wars of the day, that they had amazing art and architecture, and that Tenochtitlan, their capital, was much bigger, cleaner and better-run than any European city at the time.
What about the Norse? I don’t know about reading material, but pretty sure the Norse practiced group human sacrifices to at least two of their gods.
It’s possible some towns among the ancient Celts did too, but again, I don’t know what reading material you’d look for to confirm or deny it. I’m sure it’s out there because this is a subject of hot debate for some folks.
Why am I imagining Wayne Dolcefino here? I’d have said Marvin, but he wasn’t exactly shallow, just flamboyant and strange.
What was non-Western about the Carthaginians? They were west of Rome y’know ;).
Seriously though, kinda seems hard to cut the culture that ultimately gave us our alphabet out of the western tradition.
To be fair, though, the consensus appears to be that the massacres were not an ongoing part of Anasazi culture, but rather the relics of their somewhat apocalyptic collapse. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from reading Child’s book, which was fun.
In some places, sites were abandoned more or less orderly - in others, accompanied by massacre, burning and cannibalism. But it isn’t the case that massacre and cannibalism were typical of the culture, unlike say the Aztecs.
La Inquisición sin máscara by Antonio Puigblanch is an old old book (it’s from the 1810’s), so you can find it on Google. It’s, if I recall correctly, one of the first true scholarly books on the subject. I haven’t read it through myself, just bits and pieces referenced by other books (I don’t read Spanish), but what I recall was pretty good.
The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by Henry Kamen, is a more modern take on it. It’s revisionist, so it won’t be as “blood and guts” so to speak, but it’s still a good read. It tries to put things in the proper context, understanding the nature of Spanish society at the time.
Mamluk and Ottoman slavery however, is typically relegated to footnotes in other books about the period. Most of the books specifically dealing with the topics are in Turkish or Arabic, neither of which I read, so I can’t give you any recommendations there.
For the Maya, there’s this paper that discusses child sacrifice, another article New perspectives on human sacrifice and ritual body treatment in ancient Maya society on Springerlink, Capture and Sacrifice At Palenque, and Ritual Blood Sacrifice among the Ancient Maya are all very interesting reads.
Yeah, but their cradle culture was from well east of Rome.
I guess those ancient peoples were colonizing like crazy. Carthage was to Phoenicia what Ionia was to Greece, it seems, although in opposite directions.
Jeez! Remind me not to bitch about the return on my money market plans!
Ele the Stoic, excellent links, cheers!
Well, I’ve seen references to Norse human sacrifice - “blood-eagling” and such - but was never able to track it back to any really concrete records or archaeological evidence, at least not for the Viking period. If it happened at all, my impression is that it was so limited that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Beyond which, Norse domestic society wasn’t scary at all, but actually very liberal - women had considerable rights, literacy may well have been very high, and they went off to found IIRC the world’s longest-running democracy in Iceland. The churchmen on the British Isles and in France who saw their treasuries plundered gave them a bad rap
I don’t know where they get that stuff about “usually causing death.” Scalping alone often didn’t cause death. Imagine the special humiliation of being scalped and left alive.
There is a contemporaneous and scanned English translation available for free on Google. I just downloaded it to my phone from the Google Play store for some “light” reading on-the-go. 
Huh. Makes sense that it would be small or nonexistent, but I could swear I saw a half-decent documentary a while back which briefly mentioned mass hangings.
I’m annoyed to no end when the Aztecs are portrayed as so terrible and bloodthirsty and blahdy blah blah, so I’d love to know more who did what where in regards to gore in the ancient world.
The blood-eagle killing was for traitors, not as a sacrifice to gods, and as noted if it happened it didn’t happen often. You had to have been unusually nasty to warrant that, as it would have been much simpler to simply hack off your head.
The human-sacrifice-for-Norse-gods was supposedly in honor of Odin/Wotan/however you spell his name who according to myth self-sacrificed via hanging on the World Tree for nine days and nights at one point. Allegedly the blood sacrifice involved hanging men and horses on a sacred tree at the temple in Uppsala, Sweden, or hanging nine males of every species. I’ve yet to see any really solid proof of that, but then I admit I haven’t looked particularly hard for any. It might also be associated with another Norse god, but if so I don’t know which one.
And to think it was all due to a misunderstanding of the phrase “Odin was hung long”.