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An ongoing excavation in the heart of Mexico City, once the great Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, has revealed a legendary tower inlaid with hundreds of skulls. This tower was first described by Europeans in the early 16th century, when a Spanish soldier named Andres de Tapia came to the city with Hernan Cortez' invading force. In his memoirs, de Tapia described an "edifice" covered in tens of thousands of skulls. Now his account is corroborated by this historic find.
According to a report from Reuters, the tower is 6 meters in diameter, and once stood at the corner of a massive temple to Huitzilopochtli, an Aztec god associated with human sacrifice, war, and the sun. It's likely the tower was part of a structure known as the Huey Tzompantli, which many of de Tapia's contemporaries also described.
Tzompantli were ceremonial wooden scaffolds used in many ancient cultures of the Americas to display the skulls of human sacrifices. Priests would prepare each skull by drilling two holes in it, then stringing it like a bead on a long cord. Once a set of skulls had been strung together, the cord would be stretched between two wooden posts, to form one row of skulls among many. The sight was designed to terrify the Aztec's enemies, and it certainly worked in the case of Spanish soldiers. Many recorded their terror upon seeing tzompantli in Tenochtitlan.
National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia]) archaeologist Raul Barrera told Reuters that "the skulls would have been set in the tower after they had stood on public display on the tzompantli." It appears that the skulls were coated in lime and sunk into the wall of the tower in tidy rows.
Source: Ars Technica
Additional Coverage:
Reuters
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mykl on Friday July 07 2017, @01:06AM (2 children)
I hear that modern leaders also produce horrifying imagery to terrify their enemies. For Trump, it's his hair and tan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @04:21AM
tiny hands, you know what Im sayin'?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday July 07 2017, @04:03PM
Tan? He's orange! I suspect he may be a space alien...
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday July 07 2017, @01:29AM (15 children)
Apparently if you want pictures you have to leave the US press behind.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40473547 [bbc.com]
I like to recall these things when people wax eloquent about the life of bliss of primitive people.
These days we get indigent if someone uses the wrong word in the line at the fast food joint.
In those days you were just lucky to make it to lunch time on any given day.
Its not like this kind of utter brutality was rare in the ancient world.
Marching around with protest signs chanting childish slogans got your head on the wall in short order.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @01:39AM (3 children)
Homeless shelters are full of unlucky losers who cursed out the slow fuckface in line at the fast food joint, got arrested, got fired, and never found another job, ever. There are people in this world who don't live the charmed life of Michael David "I'm Crazy Great" Crowfard who crows about how great he is because he was lucky enough not to die in the fucking gutter. You were saying something about how modern civilization is better? You're right. It's better at letting people live long enough to suffer. FUCK. YOU.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @02:46AM (2 children)
I wouldn't call that "unlucky", I'd call that "stupid". I don't see primitive societies being any better for the stupid than modern ones. After all, we somehow got smart in the first place. It was probably because nature strongly selected against the stupid. So even for these sad examples of the human race, life is better in the modern society.
In the meantime, for the vast majority of people who can figure out how to deal with stupid people without getting fired, modern society is a hell of a lot better than being a skull in someone's tower.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday July 07 2017, @05:54AM (1 child)
I See khallows! They are one step from homelessness. Because they supported Republican economic policies! Do we blame him for his ignorance, or should we sell him as chattel? I, for one, respect human rights. But some times, for educational purposes, it might be OK to sell khallow into white Southern Californian slavery. Only Temporarily, of course.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @01:04PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Friday July 07 2017, @01:43AM (3 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @01:45AM (1 child)
Aztecs were unintelligible savages who didn't even speak the Queen's English.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @02:15AM
Don't you mean...
The King's Spanish?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @08:28AM
But probably less inbred.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @01:51AM
That's a rather condescending jab at peaceful protest
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Friday July 07 2017, @05:13AM (4 children)
Eh? I might be confusing the mayans or something (I'm so sorry, I know this is a stereotypical error at this point but I really can't remember) but these guys built stuff we'd have trouble building now. They also were the OG farming badasses [aztec-history.com].
A lot of the ideas of the primitiveness level we have is due to people writing history after dipping the quill in PURE UNHOLY LIEEEEEESSSEH and the reality is that they were killed back into a primitive state or died off because of disease and things like that.
We still can't quite figure out how the Romans knew the right combination of volcanic... Stuff and soil to deal with depletion. They apparently forgot about it too near the fall.
Bliss? I doubt it. But we give ourselves entirely too much credit for thinking "hey, we should collect our stuff together and share stuff so we don't die". I don't think they were chopping heads left and right. We're also assuming a lot about our era by calling women and children going into war primitive. This stuff is almost 500 years old. How often have people's thinking and culture changed in 50 years? Utter brutality to you might have been honor to them.
Oh and for whatever it's worth. You might find this scary and macabre. I find it incredibly interesting. Maybe they felt they were honoring the warriors? Maybe they needed space.
Incidentally, the conquistadors were probably terrified of la muerte [quora.com]. Do we know if the Aztecs associated it with such things too before the spaniards? I've already seen two conflicting theories of it being sacrifice or warriors.
I'm not being a smartass. I get your point. I just think it's a big mistake to go around discounting some of the most interesting human beings to ever live because you want to take a stab at people with the privilege and time to be a fulltime protester in 2017. History deserves better mang.
P.S. Fighting Nito in there would just be bitchin'
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 07 2017, @06:22AM (1 child)
6 meters...about 20 feet diameter? That's about the size of the average master bedroom here in the USofA. That could easily be just a few generations of one family, or the heroes of one tribe. One could probably make a structure like that of...say..,the skulls of the Wounded Knee Massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre [wikipedia.org]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @08:40AM
I think your underestimating significantly. They also described that it towered over them. So that's probably at least around 5 meters in height.
Volume of the tower: 141m²
Skull capacity I could find is a little under 1500 cm². Lets say you can only stack that about 50% efficient. (Pure guess)
That gives me around 47000 skulls. Even if that 50% efficiency is reduced, that's still a very big number, much more than a few heroes or a few generations of the same family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:43AM
Olmecs, bro, Olmecs. Or the ones before them. Big Giant Heads. But what was your point?
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @01:14PM
How the Romans knew? Aliens, of course. Humans are obviously too dumb to learn from trial and error.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @12:25PM
Primitive society isn't all that different from modern society: it's good to be in with the ruling class, it sucks to be in the working class, and it really sucks to be on the receiving end of military intervention.
Air conditioning, industrialized agriculture, global travel, instant communication, and nothing in the above has really changed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Friday July 07 2017, @01:58AM (28 children)
Why are they removing the skulls rather than conserving the tower intact? I didn't see an explanation in the article...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KiloByte on Friday July 07 2017, @02:37AM (27 children)
Because the conquerors' religion still despises the natives' religion, even after all those hundreds of years. And they still say the Aztecs were murderous barbarians while Christians slaughtered many orders of magnitude more.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @02:42AM (2 children)
Westerners' superior culture and technology led them to spread around the world.
They carried germs with them, which devastated the local populations.
Christians interpreted these mysterious plagues as the very Hand of God clearing the way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @07:49AM
cf. Guns, Germs And Steel [kyschools.us]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @01:07PM
They were in every possible interpretation of the situation: Christian germs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @02:52AM (13 children)
In the defense of Christians, the Aztecs were murderous barbarians who didn't kill many orders of magnitude more people only because they didn't have the opportunity and technology to do so. There is no analogue in Old World history to the mass ritual sacrifices of Mesoamerica. I think it's no stretch here to consider that such a violent society in absence of the intervention of the Europeans could very well evolve into a similarly violent modern society with nuclear weapons and such. How many more orders of magnitude would they have killed then?
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday July 07 2017, @05:01AM
I visited Warsaw. Beautiful city! Very friendly people! And it used to have wall-to-wall Jews. Jews like you've never seen in your life. The most in Europe. But the Jews were reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of them, along with countless others, during a brutal occupation. It must have been almost as bad as these mass killings in Mexico.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:48AM (11 children)
Except the Holocaust? and the Churches of Skulls in Bohemia. [dailymail.co.uk] Vlad the impaler, and the Sorrow of Moldavia? khallow of very little historical knowledge, you make a mistake. At least the Aztecs were not racist!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @11:28AM
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday July 07 2017, @01:00PM (1 child)
Vigo the Carpathian, who was the Scourge of Carpathia and the Sorrow of Moldavia, commands you remember that he's a Ghostbusters villain and not an actual historical figure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:02AM
You are but the buzzing of flies to him! Vigo says:
No Aztec ruler ever said anything so absolutely evil.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @01:12PM (7 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @09:58PM (6 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower [wikipedia.org]
Similar? Turks, made of Serbian skulls. And that "inquisition" thing is just wrong. Nobody saved the bones from the Spanish inquisition, because no one expected it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:26AM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:12AM (4 children)
I am starting to think that khallow lost relatives to the Aztec, or that he saw Mel Gibson's very bad movie, Apocalypto [imdb.com].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:50PM (3 children)
My point remains. The Aztecs (and many other cultures in this area) killed a lot of people every year just to keep their neighbors down. There is no analogue to this in the modern world. The US (who would be the nearest equivalent to the Aztecs as the current relatively dominant power in the world) isn't demanding the delivery of millions of people for public, ritual slaughter as tribute each year from their subordinate neighbors and client states.
The original claim that "Christianity" is somehow as bad as the Aztecs' religion completely ignores the bloodbath that the Aztecs had going on continuously. I'll note also that when various parties in this thread were straining for anything even remotely close, they couldn't find a single Christian example, but had to resort to Islamic, Nazi, and Communist examples.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:59PM (2 children)
Your point is pure speculation. Is this your realpolitik world view projecting onto the Aztecs? For them sacrifice was religious, not political. Now for Christians, massacre is political, not religious. Once again, khallow is wrong. Poor khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
I guess I must know more of them than you.
Or not. Religious dictates often followed political realities.
I see the non sequiturs are coming out. You still have to look at the incident and degree of massacres, comparing the steady, rather large ones of the Aztecs to the alleged ones of the Christians. My view is that we have a high frequency and lethality of Aztec massacres.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:59PM
REMEMBER Magdeburg! [wikipedia.org] Yes, khallow, you know more than the average AC, it's just that what you think you know is not actually what you know. We wish you a happy St. Bartholomew's Day! [wikipedia.org] "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday July 07 2017, @03:13AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @03:33AM
The Aztecs oppressed and killed the other native peoples. That's probably their skulls in the tower.
How do you think a handful of Spaniards were able to conquer Mexico? They allied with the non-Aztec native peoples who were all too happy to get rid of the Aztecs.
And BTW, the dig is being conducted because it's ARCHAEOLOGY, you dumbass.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 07 2017, @02:24PM (7 children)
"while Christians slaughtered many orders of magnitude more."
Citations needed. And, make 'em good. Before you start, you DO realize that the vast majority of Native Americans who died after the Euros arrived, died of disease? To make your case, you'll have to show that the Euros INTENTIONALLY engaged in germ warfare against the American peoples. And, to make your case, you will also need to examine better the numbers of people put to death by the Azteca over time. A mere column containing ~50,000 skulls is a drop in the bucket.
The Aztec were a death worshipping people. They accepted human sacrifice as necessary to appease the gods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:08PM (6 children)
Okey Dokey.
Siege of Fort Pitt [wikipedia.org], smallpox, Brits.
Upper Missouri [soylentnews.org], smallpox, Americans.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 08 2017, @03:43PM (5 children)
At Fort Pitt, the attempt isn't controversial at all. But, your own link shows the controversy regarding the effectiveness of that attempt. There was an epidemic, anyway. How did the disease get into the fort, to start with? The disease was going around already. It can be argued that the English caused more deaths, but again, there is argument. Small pox is a bit difficult to spread on blankets and linen.
OK - you've established an instance of intention. The other link doesn't want to load for me.
I'm also aware of some "good Christian" people later in history who attempted to spread disease in the same manner. Can't remember details at the moment, but I've read the stories.
And, again, the efficiency of spreading small pox with blankets is highly questionable.
But, I must point out, that at these late dates, when the English and/or Americans actually tried to spread disease, the vast majority of Native Americans had already died off due to disease. At this point in time, the attempts become very nearly irrelevant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:03PM (4 children)
A simple apology for your ignorance would have sufficed.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 09 2017, @11:27AM (3 children)
And, a simple apology for your arrogance will suffice here. Disease killed most of the Native Americans, not White Eyes. That doesn't excuse those attempts by the whites to kill the natives with disease, but those attempts were pretty much ineffective. Ignorance and nature killed most of the Native Americans, despite all the various attempts to paint history differently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @09:04PM (2 children)
Shut up, Runaway!! White Eyes? Who ever even said that? You live on Osage ground, one would think you would be more respectful. Idiot.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 10 2017, @07:46PM (1 child)
Respect, you say? Maybe you should have enough respect to learn some Native American history. The Osage are known to white people as "plains Indians". The Osage started out east of the Mississippi, in direct competition with the Iroquois nation. By the time the first White man met an Osaage, their culture was that of buffalo hunters on the high plains. Their culture was a warrior culture. Where I live, the Caddo ruled. Like the Iroquois nation, the Caddo tribes were rather peaceful, incorporating agriculture into their hunter/gatherer society, Respect. You should try some. The Caddo were more civilized than the Osage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:56AM
So did the Caddo do the whole tower of skulls thing? Or is that just the KKK? Iroquois? In Arkansas?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @03:54AM
Skulls for the Skull Throne!
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Khorne [wikia.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday July 07 2017, @06:03AM
Of course this is more important than one of the most conservative religious groups repudiating the racism of the alt-right. Yeah. Of course. There is no racism in the "West". Where "West" means white Catholic pedofile culture! Well, we will see how this turns out, after the Mighenly Busstardian realizes he has sided with the pedofiles, the xenophobes, and the illiterati illuminatii. Should be a good ride! Remember, "alt" in German means "old", so "alt-right" means "old right", like, you know, Nazis.
Nazis did not tower the skulls, they just pulled the gold teeth, and used the rest for oven-fodder. At least the Aztecs were honest.
(Score: 1) by nrudaz on Friday July 07 2017, @09:09AM (1 child)
We have plenty of those things in Europe too: http://empiredelamort.com/charnels-and-ossuaries/ [empiredelamort.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @09:02PM
One factor that may differentiate the Aztecs and say the Paris catacombs is that the latter didn't die from intent to kill. The Aztec "tower" could died by the same reason, but it seems not known. However they seemed violent so it doesn't seem far fetched that they died from intent to kill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:39PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide [wikipedia.org]
http://davidcdagley.blogspot.my/2013/11/the-killing-fields-of-cambodia.html [blogspot.my]
http://sunshinecoastbirds.blogspot.my/2016/11/killing-fields-of-cambodia.html [blogspot.my]
http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/cambodian-genocide [worldwithoutgenocide.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @09:09PM (1 child)
Let's not forget Soviet Gulag..
Or the Chinese "cultural revolution".
Seems communism have a tendency to slaughter those that can be suspected of thought crime. Other extreme ideologies do the same but the scale is horrific. The central core seems to be a senseless belief in a ideology and disregard for other peoples will or life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:22PM
And let's not forget the massacre in Bowling Green, and last night in Sweden!