[Aztlan] Only 50/year sacrificed at Tenochtitlan?

[Bertrand Lobjois]

The Cronicles of Sahagun or Duran explains us that some captives made on the
battlefield were sacrified for the feast in each neighbourhood in little
teocalli... I believe in massive sacrifices for important events. Maybe the
Spaniard exagerated the number of the victims a little in order to favorize
the evangelization. But look what happened in the feathered serpent's
pyramid of Teotihuacan : Sugiyama's work in the 1980-90's showed us that
massive sacrifices have existed from early times in Mesoamerican.

Bertrand LOBJOIS
Universidad de Monterrey
Division de Ciencias Sociales


2009/1/27 J. L. Baker <sierradeagua at yahoo.com>

>
> Related to this discussion are two articles by Barry Isaac from 1983 on
> Aztec warfare (see references below) in which he reviewed the accounts on
> the number of captives taken in battle. His results, including the Flowery
> War battles were that relatively few individuals were actually taken as
> captives in warfare. Its been a while since I have read the articles, so I
> don't recall the exact numbers any more, but I want to say that most battles
> resulted in less than a 100 captives, with the larger numbers around 300 or
> so captives. With clear evidence that many war captives were sold into
> slavery, this substantially reduces the number of captives available for
> sacrifice as well, which fits in well with the argument presented by Baron.
>
>
> Isaac, Barry
> 1983 Aztec Warfare: Goals and Battlefield Comportment. Ethnology 22:
> 121-131.
>
> 1983 The Aztec "Flowery War": A Geopolitical Explanation. Journal of
> Anthropological Research 39: 415-432.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeff Baker
>
>
>
>
>
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