Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Restall. Amara Solari.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the sixteenth century, European settler-colonists in the Americas developed tropes of barbarity that they applied to Indigenous American populations. Primary among these tropes were allegations of “human sacrifice” performed for millennia in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Ting.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rooted in the Eurocentric concept of Classical antiquity, the “Classic” period is considered to have epitomized Maya civilization, standing in contrast to the developments that characterize the periods that came before and after. This dichotomy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Lin. Guopeng Chen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The procurement and consumption of jade are conventionally thought to have been under the control of Maya elites. Through cross-cultural comparison with ancient China as a representative jade-using culture, we argue that the multidimensional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosamund Fitzmaurice.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation reconsiders what has conventionally been described as Mesoamerican “slavery.” Slavery is but one form of forced labor within various informal and institutionalized practices. Thus far, the majority of Mesoamerican forced labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Enriquez.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines the 1562 confessions of Maya ritual murder (“Procesos contra los indios idólatras de Sotuta, . . .” “Processes against the idolatrous Indians of Sotuta, . . .”) obtained during the Idolatry Trials led by Friar Diego de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eponine Wong.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The term “democracy,” with its roots in the Greek word demokratia, originally referred to the capacity of “the people” to make collective decisions regarding wider society and to effect change in the public sphere. As republicanism emerged in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel May Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, I argue that paganism-barbarism not only amalgamated colonial propaganda to portray the Maya Peoples as enemies of the crown for the sake of colonization but also served to legally disable any Maya who dared to claim their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples were exceptionally aware and observant of their natural world and the cycles of nature, particularly the alternation of the seasons. Many of their representations were aptly identified with the dry or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Cucina. Allan Ortega Muñoz.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern migration theories are based on a capitalistic view of economic forces for people (mostly males) to migrate in search of better economic conditions. However, the dynamics that characterize modern times are hardly applicable to prehispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriel Wrobel. Shawn Morton.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As if by default, deposits of human remains in caves and cenotes in the southern Maya Lowlands dating to the Late and Terminal Classic periods have been interpreted by many archaeologists as sacrificial victims. The position seems predicated on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara Moore. James Aimers.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya E-Groups have been a subject of archaeological fascination for nearly a century, resulting in extensive literature on E-Groups. However, consistency in that literature is hard to find. In this paper, we review some problems with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casper Jacobsen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish accounts from sixteenth-century colonial New Spain tell us that the Aztecs “sacrificed” humans, a notion that has been corroborated and expanded by scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology,...