Knife marks and teeth marks on the bones. That’s pretty conclusive evidence of cannibalism, I’d say. Another data point in favor of Michael Harner’s theory (also supported by Marvin Harris) about the Aztecs.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/23/aztecs.cannibals.reut/index.html
I had no idea anyone doubted the Aztecs were cannibals. I thought that was pretty well-established.
Heck, there have been active debates recently on this Board about whether non-emergency cannibalism has been practiced anywhere. A lot of people think all such clasims are really calumny.
And while I think Harner’s theory holds up, I understand it’s still not completely accepted.
I wonder if this will take any wind out of the sails of the “We’re so proud of our Aztec heritage, just check out this oversized t-shirt” cholo culture that’s so prevalent in the SW USA.
Why would it? I don’t follow. Just because of the cannibalism, or because of the murder and torture? Because murder, torture, slavery, etc are parts of the histories of many heritages that people are proud of today.
But, in bringing up Harner, you seem to be conflating two different issues here.
The first is whether or not the Aztecs practiced cannibalism.
The second is, if they practiced cannibalism, why did they do it?
It’s been a few years since i read Harner’s stuff (actually, about 10 years, in an undergrad anthropology course), but if i remember correctly, a key aspect of his argument was that cannibalism provided the Aztecs with a ready source of protein, making up for the relative lack of good protein sources in the regions around Tenochtitlan. He used this ecological argument as an explanatory framework for the Aztecs’ cannibalism.
It seems to me that one can argue that the Aztecs did, in fact, practice cannibalism, without accepting Harner’s argument about the ecological basis for that cannibalism.
mhendo – True, but many of the naysayers about Harner’s “cannibal kingdom” theory go so far as to deny that cannibalism ever existed outside of tall tales. That was an issue on this Board, as well. All those tales the Conquistadores brought back were insulting lies by neighboring groups, or misinterpretations of relatively rare ceremonial cannibalism of single royal victims, or whatever.
This current article supports the idea of large-scale and time-concentrated cannibalism. t not only supports the truth of cannibalism, but that it was “industrial” in scale, more like Harner’s idea than small-scale ritual cannibalism.
I was going with the “cannibalism of non-combatant enemies, not motivated by immediate prospect of starvation” part. It seems to lack a certain cool factor.
That makes sense. I hadn’t followed the previous board debates on this issue.
I wonder how they came up with some of the details in the article - the six-month timeline, a few people chosen at a time, hearts being eaten “raw and bloody,” priests being imported from other areas. That seems like information that might be gathered from artistic renderings of events, but not from bones and possesions recovered from an old well.
I don’t think being on a large scale necessarily means it wasn’t ritualistic (?).
Did they leave behind any reports on what it tasted like? Somebody wanted to know about that in GQ a while back.
The more important question is what did the Aztecs say when they ate some new kind of meat?
“Mmmm. Tastes like Incan.”
Last I heard, in the book that the movie Alive was based on the survivors said that human tastes like pork.
I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea on the veracity of that.
According to people in the area I grew up in, rattlesnake tastes like chicken–in case you are interested.
Paul, the people who complain about Those Nasty Spaniards going to America and killing all the So-Pacific Indians say that reports about the Aztecs being the ruling opressors of their neighbors are just “Black Legend”. People from Tlaxcala have a bad rap among other Mexicans because Doña Marina la Malinche (Cortés’ wife - yes I know they weren’t legally married, so?) was a Tlaxcalteca; the Republicans painted them as “traitors”. I won several Tlaxcalteca hearts by pointing out that she wasn’t an Aztec - she was Tlaxcalteca and did what she did because she saw helping Cortés as a way to get her people from under the Aztec knife. The Spaniards weren’t no wallflowers, but at least we weren’t into human sacrifice. Except if you listen to those People Who Complain, of course! I’ve even been told that we spread the flu on purpose.
Mind you, many of those people are related to the ones who say that the Earth is flat and the pictures on plane windows are just projected movies. Never found me one who could explain the pictures you see from a plane’s open door 
First, you have it backwards…chicken tastes very much like rattlesnake. And also very much like cobra.
Also, pork tastes very much like long pig, not the other way around!
Heh - heh. You bad man…although I’d have gone with
“Tastes like Chichen !”
You know, if I was in charge of tackling a new continent, and I heard that the natives had captured 500+ civilians, including pregnant women and service staff (the cooks), and were keeping them in cages, sacrificing a few each day, eating their hearts raw while the still-living victims watched… you know, maybe it’s a moral failing in me, but I think I’d be tempted to exterminate the bastards, too.
Self-righteous, ahistorical moral absolutism. It’s what’s for breakfast.
“It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom - then we shall follow ours.” - Sir Charles Napier