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posted by mrpg on Friday July 07 2017, @01:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the calaveras dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1) by nrudaz on Friday July 07 2017, @09:09AM (1 child)

    by nrudaz (6417) on Friday July 07 2017, @09:09AM (#536052)

    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

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 07 2017, @09:02PM (#536264) Journal

    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.