DailyKenn.com | AbateHate.com | New Facebook Group
MEXICO CITY — (DailyKenn.com) Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is one of the few films I’ve ever felt compelled to watch. Gibson’s screenplay vividly portrays the violence and ritual bloodlust that marked parts of the pre-Columbian Americas. In the final scene, ships appear on the horizon—a detail many viewers missed. Those vessels symbolized the arrival of Europeans, whose coming would soon bring an end to the native culture’s cycle of ritual massacres.
But was the story grounded in fact—or pure fiction?
An email from my friend Charles Lincoln, a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard, got me wondering. He sent me Wikipedia links about cannibalism and human sacrifice in pre-Columbian societies.
That was the spark I needed. What follows is what I discovered.
Your $8 monthly partner pledge helps us reach others & more ►
A growing body of archaeological and historical evidence confirms that ritualized human sacrifice and, in some cases, the consumption of human flesh occurred across several pre-Columbian American societies, carried out for religious, political or crisis-driven reasons.
In the heart of the Valley of Mexico, the Aztec civilization conducted large-scale public sacrifices in the 15th and early 16th centuries, often following calendrical or war-related rituals. Victims were sometimes subjected to heart-extraction, followed by their transformation symbolically into deities. Contemporary Spanish accounts and recent archaeological finds indicate that parts of the victim’s flesh may have been distributed in ceremonial meals. Accepted by participants as a sacred act rather than ordinary violence, this practice was embedded in a complex cosmology of offering life to the gods.
Farther south in the Andes, the Chimú civilization and other groups on Peru’s north coast conducted mass sacrifices of children and llamas around 1400 AD to appease deities during times of heavy rain and social upheaval. In the western United States, sites attributed to the Ancestral Puebloans (often called Anasazi) show butcher-marked remains dated to around 1150 AD, including human coprolite evidence, that indicate human flesh consumption following what appears to have been ritual or warfare-related violence.
Witness accounts from 16th-century Spanish chroniclers describe sacrificial victims dressed as gods, publicly killed in temple precincts, and in some cases the meat of captives served in festive communal meals. Excavations confirm cut marks, disarticulation and thermal processing of human remains in sacrificial contexts — though modern scholars caution that not all archaeological signatures necessarily represent cannibalism and point to survival or secondary-burial alternatives.
There are no legal charges from ancient times, but contemporary responses include calls for respectful treatment of remains, reconciliation with descendant Indigenous communities and deeper scholarly inquiry into the motivations behind these practices. Local reactions vary. Some Indigenous groups emphasize the need to contextualize the practices as part of cosmological systems rather than criminal violence; others emphasize the importance of education and respectful exhibition in museums.
While calls to interpret ancestral violence “in its historical context” may sound reasonable, it’s worth recalling how reports of mass graves at former Canadian residential schools were widely circulated before being verified. For instance, headlines claimed that the remains of 215 “missing children” had been found in an apple orchard at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags flown at half-mast to honor the supposed victims. [source].
It is true that child mortality rates were high across all societies before Western advances in health care, and burial near institutions or mission sites was common practice. Moreover, some of the same voices that condemn residential schools for “cultural indoctrination” often criticize those same societies for periods when Indigenous peoples had little or no access to formal education.
Finally, if calls for historical respect are to be consistent, it is vital to recognize the rights and cultural continuity of all peoples, including Europeans, whose cultural preservation is being compromised to inevitable extinction due to migration.
None dare call it genocide.
What am I missing? Did I get something wrong? Please let us all know in the comment section.
National Geographic: Severed Heads Were Sacrifices in Ancient Mexico
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/130206-mexico--xaltocan-human-sacrifice-skulls-drought-archeology
National Geographic: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World's Largest
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mass-child-human-animal-sacrifice-peru-chimu-science
Reuters: Maya sacrifice of twin boys revealed by DNA from Chichen Itza
(https://www.reuters.com/science/maya-sacrifice-twin-boys-revealed-by-dna-chichen-itza-2024-06-12/
Smithsonian Magazine: See the Face of an Inca Teenager Killed in a Ritual
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-the-face-of-an-inca-teenager-killed-during-a-ritual-sacrifice-some-500-years-ago-180983139/
Britannica: Human sacrifice
https://www.britannica.com/topic/human-sacrifice
This article includes embedded decoy information to detect unauthorized use and copyright infringement. Reproduction is permitted only verbatim and in full, with all links preserved and attribution clearly given to DailyKenn.com and AbateHate.com.
Find archived black-on-white homicide news reports here ►
200 latest news reports from 100 top conservative websites