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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: 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]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(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]