The ancient city-state of Teotihuacan was long thought a relatively gentle place because its art lacked the glorification of sacrifice and war so common in other Mesoamerican civilisations.
Now a team of archaeologists has gone beneath that peaceful appearance and revealed the skeletons in the city’s pyramid.
The first ever excavation of the 1 900-year-old Pyramid of the Moon has uncovered the bones of a dozen adult males, 10 of them decapitated and all of them apparently offered up to the gods. Three other smaller-scale human offerings were also found in the seven-year project, which tunnelled deep into the solid stone-and-earth structure.
Though not the first sacrificial burials uncovered at the huge site just north-east of Mexico City, the skeletons in the pyramid show for the first time how central the practice was to the culture over time.
Surrounded by cardboard boxes full of the pyramid’s secrets, now laid bare on cotton wool and enveloped in tissue paper, Mexican archaeologist Ruben Cabrera rattled off the details of each discovery.
The latest hoard was the biggest and most complex, focusing on two high-status males richly adorned with, among other things, jawbone-shaped shell necklaces typical of Mesoamerican warriors.
The pair, possibly killed by small jade daggers in their backs, were accompanied by 10 other headless adults with bound hands and feet.
The bones of pumas, jaguars, coyotes, wolves, eagles and snakes filled in any gaps, along with a cache of stunningly crafted artefacts including obsidian sacrificial knives.
”There may be still some people who cling to the vision of Teotihuacan as a peaceful place, but I think the evidence now is overwhelming,” said George Cowgill, a veteran expert on the city from Arizona State University.
At its peak around AD300, Teotihuacan covered almost thirteen square kilometres and housed about 150 000 people. Three hundred years later it disappeared, consumed, according to one theory, by a popular uprising sparked by a scarcity of crops.
Today Teotihuacan is one of the most studied of the pre-Columbian civilisations, but remains one of the least understood.
The rise of the rather romantic theory that this was an island of peace and civic harmony in a bloodthirsty region is rooted in the study of the art, where birds and butterflies hold sway over the more usual gore.
The same logic has led many to argue that the absence of depictions of glorious rulers suggests an egalitarian collective leadership very different from the typically Mesoamerican regal dynasties. Certainly nobody has yet dug up a king’s tomb.
So who ordered all the sacrifices and directed the wars? That mystery, at least, remains unsolved. – Guardian Unlimited Â