heydaralon wrote:The Aztecs are my favorite pre-Columbian group. They were brutal, but also had a complex interesting society. Part of their belief system compelled them to keep their cities clean for the gods. In contrast to the dirty cities of Europe, the Aztec cities were immaculate. When the conquistadors saw the city for the first time, they were shocked at how clean it was, and half believed that they were in some sort of supernatural realm.
Tower of human skulls in Mexico casts new light on Aztecs
Yuh, they liked to keep things tidy--to keep more room for their skull collections.
Reuters wrote:Archaeologists have found more than 650 skulls caked in lime and thousands of fragments in the cylindrical edifice near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.
The tower is believed to form part of the Huey Tzompantli, a massive array of skulls that struck fear into the Spanish conquistadores when they captured the city under Hernan Cortes, and mentioned the structure in contemporary accounts.
Historians relate how the severed heads of captured warriors adorned tzompantli, or skull racks, found in a number of Mesoamerican cultures before the Spanish conquest.
But the archaeological dig in the bowels of old Mexico City that began in 2015 suggests that picture was not complete.
"We were expecting just men, obviously young men, as warriors would be, and the thing about the women and children is that you'd think they wouldn't be going to war," said Rodrigo Bolanos, a biological anthropologist investigating the find.
So... not just warriors, eh? Perhaps the women and children were more tender. No wonder so many natives joined with the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs.
"She had yellow hair and she walked funny and she made a noise like... O my God, please don't kill me! "