[Aztlan] Only 50/year sacrificed at Tenochtitlan?

[Dodds Pennock, Dr C.E.]

Dear colleagues,

My thanks to Lloyd for a thoughtful response to my post. I appreciate your comments and the chance to reply to them. Just a few supplementary thoughts prompted by Lloyd's email.

My apologies if I was guilty in the email of appearing to present theories as fact. I should perhaps have emphasized (and maybe assumed too much that we all take for granted) that pretty much any statistic or estimation related to this subject must always be highly speculative. I hope in fact that my research is never anything other than highly tentative in its conclusions, as to do otherwise would be foolish. Naturally, my book (and more relevantly to some of this material, the article I have coming out in the next year or so) goes into far more detail regarding the logic and research behind my ideas, but they are most certainly suggestions, not claims of fact. My emails are obviously a brief summary of some of my research conclusions, not the substance of the research itself. You are absolutely right that the Florentine Codex is an extremely problematic source. I have worked with it extensively, but remain highly sceptical of many of its claims. Nonetheless, I feel it is a source which it is helpful to add to the debate. You're also right that the tzompantli figures are very problematic, and should only be considered in context and comparison with other material.

On the question of the calpulli districts, I do not believe I was 'maximising' the figures, but as I mentioned stating the possibility that the figure may have been multiplied by as many as twenty (at the most). My intention was to try and get a sense of the likely minimum and maximum figures. I am also not sure that I precisely understand the criticism of my statement that variable population figures muddy the water somewhat. Perhaps I was unclear, but my point here was that some sources (such as Ixtlilxochitl who uses 'one in five' as his figure) make reference to sacrificial statistics in terms of proportions, which makes comparison (without absolutely established population figures) difficult. When I started working on the collaborative project about homicide in Latin America, I discovered that historians of violence and homicide like to state death rates in terms of figures per head of population (in order to facilitate comparison) and was therefore encouraged to attempt to place my own thoughts in this context. This led me to realise exactly how difficult this is for Aztec culture in view of the indeterminate population size. I was certainly not asserting that we ought to start at this point, only that it is an additional difficulty.

Finally, to address the question of my own 'sensationalist' book title. In actual fact, the title of the book (Bonds of Blood) contains a double meaning and in fact refers specifically to blood in the sense of kin and family ties. The original driving force of my research was a reappraisal of gender roles in Aztec society and (as it moved from being a thesis to a book) it took on a second agenda related to humanising Aztec culture and trying to understand how this, in many ways very familiar, very human, very modern, society, could live with spectacular bloodshed. I acknowledge that there is certainly a dual meaning in the book title,but I do not believe it is deliberately sensational, rather an attempt to address preconceptions and move past them, turning the idea of 'blood', which I do believe was critical to the Aztecs both in a religious and a familial sense, into something other than the purely sacrificial. Especially I feel it is important to consider the issue of sacrifice directly (rather than shy away from it for fear of claims of sensationalism) for the very reason that it has come to dominate modern perceptions of Tenochtitlan. It is our responsibility as historians to address these preconceptions and to challenge them. Naturally there are those that will disagree with my interpretation. As I began by saying, Tenochtitlan is a society for which there are no real absolutes due to the nature of the sources, but I do believe it was a society in which human sacrifice and other violent rituals were highly visible and very pervasive. This is very much a matter for debate, however, and I do hope colleagues will take the time to read my work and draw their own conclusions about my research. This is a field in which no claim will ever be conclusive and I look forward to continuing this debate for many years!

Whilst my own research does suggest that there were high levels of sacrifice and bloodshed, and that the majority of Aztecs would have been regularly exposed to it, this does not equate to the implied assumption that we should project our own attitudes onto them, regard them critically, or sensationalize their lives. I certainly do not believe that we should view Aztec society only through the lens of human sacrifice, but I do believe it was extremely significant to the Aztecs and therefore something we should consider in attempting to understand their society. I also believe that there is a problematic undertone in some of this debate which presumes that research regarding human sacrifice, particularly that which concludes that there were high volumes of sacrificial victims, must necessarily be opposed to an interpretation of Aztec culture as sophisticated, educated and compassionate. The extreme expression of this are the vocal attacks by ‘Neo-Mexica’ groups seeking to ‘reclaim’ the indigenous past, which claim that histories of violent practices are colonial inventions (or at worst exaggerations) intended to justify conquest.  The irony of this revisionist discourse is that it embraces unquestioningly the imperialist attitudes it claims to deny, accepting the underlying assumption that ritual violence can only be practised by an irretrievably cruel and barbaric culture.

The Mexica Movement wrote of Apocalypto that it showed indigenous people as ‘the worst of people committing human sacrifice, a people worthy of being destroyed by Europeans’.  However defensible might be their criticisms of the film’s content and its political, religious and racial agendas, this statement fails to recognize that the practice of human sacrifice does not necessarily provide a justification for conquest. Groups such as the Mexica Movement have been unable to accept that human sacrifice could be practised by a sophisticated and in many ways extremely familiar society. They believe that only by denying human sacrifice can they reclaim and celebrate their cultural heritage, and this abhorrence of sacrifice has permeated both academic and popular dialogue.

Colonial justifications of conquest were frequently rooted in the opposition of ideas of civilization and barbarism, setting European Judaeo-Christian values against the savage paganism of the newly discovered peoples.  The revisionist refusal to accept the reality of human sacrifice is, in part, a perfectly legitimate refusal to accept the validity of such discourses, but its effect has been to muddy the waters of historical research and to accept an underlying premise which demonizes the practitioners of human sacrifice and relegates them to the realm of the ‘uncivilized’. It is this association between violence and savagery which I believe we must labour to break in order better to understand Aztec society.

Best wishes,
Caroline
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Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock
Lecturer in Early Modern History
School of Historical Studies
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester
LE1 7RH

tel: 0116 223 1229
mobile: 07740675610
email: ced22 at le.ac.uk
http://www.le.ac.uk/history/people/ced22.html