Post by Admin on Sept 4, 2019 18:31:57 GMT
Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.
"This is a world of information," says archaeologist Raùl Barrera Rodríguez, director of INAH's Urban Archaeology Program and leader of the team that found the tzompantli. "It's an amazing thing, and just the kind of discovery many of us had hoped for," agrees John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who studies human sacrifice. He and other researchers hope the skulls will clarify the role of large-scale human sacrifice in Mexica religion and culture—and whether, as scholars suspect, it played a key part in building their empire.
The discovery of the tzompantli began the same way all the Urban Archaeology Program's digs do: with a planned construction project in the heart of downtown Mexico City. Whenever someone wants to build in a seven-block area around the Templo Mayor, Barrera Rodríguez's team must excavate first, salvaging whatever remains of the colonial and especially Mexica city beneath. The finds are often significant and surprisingly intact. The Templo Mayor itself came to light in the 1970s, when INAH archaeologists were called in after city electrical workers stumbled on an imposing circular statue of the goddess Coyolxauhqui, who was killed and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli.
Much of the temple had survived to be discovered. The Mexica built it in seven phases between 1325 and 1521, each corresponding to the reign of a king. Each phase was built over and around the earlier ones, embedding the Templo Mayor's history within it like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Although the Spanish destroyed the temple's final phase, the smaller temples from earlier reigns were paved over but left relatively unscathed. Those ruins are now part of the Templo Mayor Museum. But many structures that surrounded the ruins remained hidden beneath the dense colonial city—and now, the modern megalopolis.
So when Barrera Rodríguez got the call to excavate a site just a few buildings down from where Guatemala Street dead-ends into the Templo Mayor complex, he knew the dig could lead to a major discovery. Starting in February 2015, his team dug about 20 test pits, unearthing modern debris, colonial porcelain, and, finally, the basalt slabs of a Mexica period floor. Then, he remembers, "Hundreds of skull fragments began to appear." In more than 2 decades of excavating in downtown Mexico City, he had never seen anything like it.
Barrera Rodríguez and INAH archaeologist and field supervisor Lorena Vázquez Vallín knew from colonial maps of Tenochtitlan that the tzompantli, if it existed, could be somewhere near their dig. But they weren't sure that's what they were seeing until they found the postholes for the skull rack. The wooden posts themselves had long since decayed, and the skulls once displayed on them had shattered—or been purposely crushed by the conquistadors. Still, the size and spacing of the holes allowed them to estimate the tzompantli's size: an imposing rectangular structure, 35 meters long and 12 to 14 meters wide, slightly larger than a basketball court, and likely 4 to 5 meters high. From their knowledge of the eras of the Templo Mayor, archaeologists estimate that the particular phases of the tzompantli they found were likely built between 1486 and 1502, although human sacrifice had been practiced in Tenochtitlan since its founding in 1325.
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.
"This is a world of information," says archaeologist Raùl Barrera Rodríguez, director of INAH's Urban Archaeology Program and leader of the team that found the tzompantli. "It's an amazing thing, and just the kind of discovery many of us had hoped for," agrees John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who studies human sacrifice. He and other researchers hope the skulls will clarify the role of large-scale human sacrifice in Mexica religion and culture—and whether, as scholars suspect, it played a key part in building their empire.
The discovery of the tzompantli began the same way all the Urban Archaeology Program's digs do: with a planned construction project in the heart of downtown Mexico City. Whenever someone wants to build in a seven-block area around the Templo Mayor, Barrera Rodríguez's team must excavate first, salvaging whatever remains of the colonial and especially Mexica city beneath. The finds are often significant and surprisingly intact. The Templo Mayor itself came to light in the 1970s, when INAH archaeologists were called in after city electrical workers stumbled on an imposing circular statue of the goddess Coyolxauhqui, who was killed and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli.
Much of the temple had survived to be discovered. The Mexica built it in seven phases between 1325 and 1521, each corresponding to the reign of a king. Each phase was built over and around the earlier ones, embedding the Templo Mayor's history within it like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Although the Spanish destroyed the temple's final phase, the smaller temples from earlier reigns were paved over but left relatively unscathed. Those ruins are now part of the Templo Mayor Museum. But many structures that surrounded the ruins remained hidden beneath the dense colonial city—and now, the modern megalopolis.
So when Barrera Rodríguez got the call to excavate a site just a few buildings down from where Guatemala Street dead-ends into the Templo Mayor complex, he knew the dig could lead to a major discovery. Starting in February 2015, his team dug about 20 test pits, unearthing modern debris, colonial porcelain, and, finally, the basalt slabs of a Mexica period floor. Then, he remembers, "Hundreds of skull fragments began to appear." In more than 2 decades of excavating in downtown Mexico City, he had never seen anything like it.
Barrera Rodríguez and INAH archaeologist and field supervisor Lorena Vázquez Vallín knew from colonial maps of Tenochtitlan that the tzompantli, if it existed, could be somewhere near their dig. But they weren't sure that's what they were seeing until they found the postholes for the skull rack. The wooden posts themselves had long since decayed, and the skulls once displayed on them had shattered—or been purposely crushed by the conquistadors. Still, the size and spacing of the holes allowed them to estimate the tzompantli's size: an imposing rectangular structure, 35 meters long and 12 to 14 meters wide, slightly larger than a basketball court, and likely 4 to 5 meters high. From their knowledge of the eras of the Templo Mayor, archaeologists estimate that the particular phases of the tzompantli they found were likely built between 1486 and 1502, although human sacrifice had been practiced in Tenochtitlan since its founding in 1325.
