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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, 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?