New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ancient Mesoamericans deemed ritual violence a crucial form of merit-making with the divine. Until recently, humans themselves were considered supreme “food staples.” Their bodies were to vitalize the cosmos at the pulse of consecrated time intervals. Victims were prepared and sacrificed in prescribed ways to liberate their animate essences, believed to be harbored mainly in a person’s heart and blood. Past death, the sanctified fleshly remnants would sometimes be processed and exhibited as trophies or relics. Although ritualized violence is abundantly recorded in iconography and has been inferred from simultaneous multiple interments and deposits of articulated body segments, only the last two decades of scholarship have seen big strides towards a more nuanced exploration of sacrificial practices. This session examines old and new graphic, archaeological, and forensic evidence across the Mesoamerican landscapes to discuss meanings, choreographies, occasions, and ceremonial devices related to ritual violence, associated body processing and in some contexts, the public display of bodies and body parts. Interpretative and methodological caveats are addressed in the way.