Victims had their hearts cut out or were decapitated, shot full of arrows, clawed, sliced to death, stoned, skinned, buried alive or tossed from the tops of temples.
It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish (True Hispanics –Ed.) conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive?
In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.
Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.
For decades, many researchers believed Spanish accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were biased to denigrate Indian cultures, others argued that sacrifices were confined to captured warriors, while still others conceded the Aztecs were bloody but thought the Maya were less so.
Children frequent victims
Children were said to be frequent victims, in part because they were considered pure and unspoiled.
“Many people said, ‘We can’t trust these codices because the Spaniards were describing all these horrible things,’ which in the long run we are confirming,” said Carmen Pijoan, a forensic anthropologist who found some of the first direct evidence of cannibalism in a pre-Aztec culture over a decade ago: bones with butcherlike cut marks.