[Aztlan] Only 50/year sacrificed at Tenochtitlan?

[ECOLING at aol.com]

On 10 January, 2009, at the Pre-Columbian Society Meeting
at the University of Pennsylvania Museum,
Joanne Baron, PhD student in Anthropology gave a very important talk
<<
Noble or Savage?
Western Representations of Human Sacrifice among the Aztecs
>>

This is only a very rough account of the talk and discussion afterwards.
All faults are my own. [Lloyd]

Baron considered several questions:
Number of victims
Extent of cannibalism
What did the idols look like?
Natives' reaction to Spaniards
Why sacrifice was practiced
And whether natives were treated as noble or savage.

She focused on the first of these questions.
She first reviewed how some current public presentations 
presented the question of how many were sacrificed.
Josh Bernstein on the History Channel was checking out some
larger numbers claimed, as to whether these were even physically
possible to process so many in a reasonable time.   The answer: no.
But Bernstein did not focus on the earliest sources of information.

A chief virtue of her talk was a very careful survey of exactly what
each of numerous writers had actually said about the question of
how many were sacrificed at Tenochtitlan or in Central Mexico.
She paid careful attention to sources of information, citations and
attribution (or lack thereof), and similar questions.

The discussion afterwards focused in on what Cortez said
and what Bartholome de las Casas said, because they were
the closest to having direct information, rather than getting
it second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, etc.
Notice the trend line as pointed out by Baron
(my notes are not complete here but give a good idea;
a "??" means either that source did not give an estimate,
or quite likely my notes failed to record what Baron said.
I am not independently claiming anything which I do not
explicitly label as mine, and have checked none of the data
here.   I am only reporting what my notes contain,
and a few comments on those notes.)

50 / year per temple, 3000-4000 total (what area?)   (Hernando Cortez)
<50 overall    (Bartolome de las Casas)

 ??                      (Anonymous Conqueror, was with Cortez)
 ??                      (Bernal Diaz de Castillo, soldier with Cortez)

2000 up to 8000 men a day on special occasions 
                      (Duran, Dominican Monk)

80,400 for the great temple in 1486 
                      (who? my notes incomplete)

??                   (Mun~oz Camargu -- his father fought with Cortez;
                              his mother was a Tlaxcalan noblewoman)

Then there is a gap of around 200 years until later writers:
12,210 on one day for one temple
                      Antonio de Leon y Gama
20,000 per year (Zumarraga quoted by Gordon)
50,000 per year (Gom/n... quoted by Gordon)
60,000 per year (number Gordon settles on)
...
William Prescott notes inconsistencies regarding 1486,
Torquemada, Ixtlilxochitl (no citations any of these)
Baron noted I think a very large number given by Prescott,
in the hundreds of thousands, and since Prescott's work 
was widely distributed, it had a 
great influence on views of the Aztecs in later works.   

Prescott was also the one who popularized the idea that
the Spaniards were regarded as descendants of Quetzalcoatl.
Other accounts seem to say some peoples of the area knew
perfectly well that the Spaniards were men.

Baron made a major point of the complete lack of citations of sources 
or of the nature of evidence regarding number of sacrifices, 
(in Prescott? and) among later writers.

1000 to 3000 per temple, thousands of temples,
so 250,000   (Michael Harner)

Estimates are impossible (Davies 1979)

80,000 in one day too much physically to process 
     (Josh Bernstein on History Channel)

Among the codices there is disagreement,
80,000 given in 3 codices,
20,000 given in the Telleriano-Remensis
One soldier said he counted 136,000 skulls 
     (which of course could not be true,
     it would take too long to count)

There was also a citation from Demarest quoted by Baron.
I Lloyd am a linguist, and am very sensitive to presuppositions.
In that quotation, Demarest used the word "the" in contexts 
which presupposed large amounts of violence, without actually
asserting the claim or providing citations for it.   Perhaps the
climate established by Prescott and others has made it more
likely that the public and even archaeologists simply assume that
the largest numbers cited for sacrifices are actually valid estimates .   

*

Our discussion after the talk focused on Cortez, for obvious reasons,
and on archaeology as another source of information.
Cortez could have had direct information from conversations
with Montezuma or others at the time.
Cortez writes of his visit to the temple that 
he requested that there be no more sacrifice,
and that from then on, the people stopped the sacrifices.
[Cortez had some need to please the Spanish Crown]
Bernal Diaz del Castillo had an opposite account of the visit,
that Montezuma felt the need to expiate his own error of
having admitted the Spaniards to the Great Temple.

In any case, if we restrict ourselves to Cortez's account
where he could have talked with people who knew the actual numbers,
the number he gives is 50.   Extrapolations to all of the Aztec
realm, or all of Central Mexico, could not be based on direct
observation or even on conversations with people who themselves
had direct knowledge.   We cannot assume that all of the many
temples in central Mexico had as many sacrifices as did
Tenochtitlan, since it was the capital of the largest and most
aggressive state of the time.

So all we know for sure is that Cortez wrote 50/year for
Tenochtitlan.

[Lloyd speaking in the next two paragraphs.]
Bartolome de las Casas was of course defending the Indians,
and so his report of less than 50, everything included,
is surely biased towards the low side.

In the light of the failure of later writers to give
citations to their sources of information,
large numbers like 250,000 must be considered to be
pulled out of a hat for reasons specific to the writers
or their anticipated audience.   
Thus they are surely irresponsible, and to the extent 
that these writers even implicitly lead readers to believe they
have reliable sources for their claims, they have been lying.

That does not mean we know the answer, just that the only
*written* reports we have suggest 50/year for the Great Temple
of Tenochtitlan is the only *reliable* information we have
in written form.

*

How about archaeology?   Baron has not attempted to sift 
this information.   Members of our audience pointed out
that a substantial number of warriors underneath the
Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan were lined up carefully
in rows, so this may not have been sacrifice.   Other clues
from archaeology can point one way or another,
and this all needs a study devoted to it.   A member of our
audience said he had asked an archaeologist working at the
excavations of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City,
and the reply was that in all the years of work there,
they have found only 130 (sacrifices?   bodies?).
None of these tidbits can lead directly to an answer to the main
question considered in the talk and in this AZTLAN message.

*

One other question got shorter discussion in Baron's talk:
Were the Aztecs nobles or savages?   Las Casas was the first
to say that human sacrifice was not unique to the Aztecs.
Three early chroniclers found nothing savage in this.

After the US-Mexican war, there was a big split,
Mexican authors thought the Aztecs were noble,
North American authors considered them Barbarians.
After WW II, there were less racial explanations.

(There was a 1979 Dumbarton Oaks conference volume,
from which people can gather the approach of that time.)

Overall, this gives a good lesson in how much reports of the 
exotic "other" are changed by the desires of later writers or 
audiences.   How much utter falsehood gets presented as
fact, both by professionals and in the public media.

We can be grateful to Joanne Baron for doing the hard work
of finding all of the citations she did, and tracing the path
of an idea through time and through different authors.

Best wishes,
Lloyd

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics
PO Box 15156
Washington DC 20003
ecoling at aol.com
202-547-7683



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