The Creation, Racialization, and Perpetuation of Aztec and Maya Human Sacrifice Mythology (with a Case Study from Yucatán)

Summary

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 the precontact past and the colonial present. In this paper, an art historian and a historian, both scholars of colonial Mesoamerica, argue for the agentic construction of these rhetorical devices. Using the sixteenth-century Catholic mural cycles of Saint Michael the Archangel at Mani as a case study, they examine changes in iconography and pigment selection in the first decades of the Franciscan evangelical campaign. These seemingly mere aesthetic choices will trace and reveal the unintended consequences of the racialized biases with which Europeans created the concept of “human sacrifice”; as a result, paradoxically, a Marian-centric form of Catholicism developed in Yucatán. This case study is but one example of how colonial processes and neocolonial misunderstandings—not actual precontact practices—led to the construction of Mesoamerica’s “human sacrifice” culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38231.0