New research indicates Spanish conquistadores butchered at least a dozen girls and children within an Aztec-allied city where the people ate and sacrificed a detachment of Spaniards they’d seized months before
New research indicates Spanish conquistadores butchered at least a dozen girls and their kids in an Aztec-allied city where the people ate and sacrificed a detachment of Spaniards they’d seized months before.
Residents of Tecoaque, also called Zultepec, seized a convoy of approximately 15 male Spaniards, 50 girls and 10 children, 45 foot soldiers that comprised Cubans of African and Native Americans, and approximately 350 allies from Native groups in 1520. All were seemingly sacrificed within the area of months.
Archeologist Enrique MartÃnez Vargas stated excavations indicate the people of Tecoaque understood a reprisal attack was coming and pitched the bones of the Spaniards — a few of which were carved into decorations — along with other signs into shallow reefs.
The townspeople tried to erect some crude defensive functions along the primary thoroughfare of the town, none of which functioned when De Sandoval and his punitive expedition wrapped in.
“A number of those warriors who had remained in town was able to flee, but women and children stayed, and they had been the principal sufferers,” the institute said in a statement. “This we’ve been able to show within a 120-meter (yard) stretch of the chief thoroughfare, where the skeletons of a dozen girls were found that seemed to be’protecting’ the bones of ten kids between the ages of six and five.”
Pictures of the excavations reveal children’s bones with those of the mature females, with a few of the women’s skulls or arm bones turned toward the kids.
“Women and children that were sheltering inside chambers were mutilated, according to the discovery of bones on the flooring. The temples were burnt and the figurines were decapitated.”
The minds of this captive Spanish girls were strung up on skull stands alongside people of men. An investigation of the bones demonstrated that the women were pregnant, also in pre-Hispanic clinic which might have qualified them as”warriors” Another sacrificial offering comprised one girl’s body which has been cut in half close to the remains of a dismembered child aged 4 or 3.
1 Spanish man was dismembered and burnt to replicate the most mythical fates of all Aztec-era gods, according to a myth called”El Quinto Sol,” or Fifth Sun.
The convoy was constituted of individuals delivered from Cuba at another expedition annually following Cortes’ first landing in 1519 and they had been going into the Aztec capital together with provides and the conquerors’ possessions.
Participants of the seized convoy were held captive in door-less cells, in which they had been fed within six months, the specialists said. Little by little, town sacrificed and ate the horses, women and men. But pigs brought by the Spaniards for meals were apparently seen with such suspicion they were murdered whole and left uneaten.
By comparison, the skeletons of those captured Europeans were ripped apart and bore cut marks suggesting that the meat has been removed from the bones.
Cortes went to conquer the capital afterwards in 1521.
Mexico is marking the 500th anniversary of the conquest this season using a unique form of scholarly and research conventions.