I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.

Because, no matter what culture you're part on, having your kill killed is going to make you be against the current rulers.

No surprise small Spanish groups of sailors and great armies of native allies could topple several empires through America.

At least for the Aztecs, this is in fact the case. The Aztec kept subjugated peoples alive to husband them to supply human beings for their sacrifices.

The Spaniards allied themselves early with these would be victims, who therefore helped remove the numeric superiority the Aztecs would have otherwise enjoyed.

These allied tribes (see the Tlaxcala) then became a privilege class among the natives.

The guns, and the horses, obviously helped - but we're talking 4 orders of magnitude advantage if the Spaniards had not allied themselves with the locals. Even pandemics cannot erase that advantage (and they take time to spread)

> I wonder if this kind of customs helped the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonization of the Inca/Aztec Empire.

I don't think so. It's probably mostly down to what Jared Diamond describes - Guns, Germs, and Steel.

The occasional score of children and conquests slaughtered voluntarily is dwarfed by the numbers of natives that died from smallpox (f.e.).

Guns may have had much less to do with it than is commonly believed. I recommend the book 1492 if you're curious about why that is.

I tend to agree. I suspect the availability of guns was useful in a few key engagements, but the accidental weaponisation of smallpox (for example) was much more effective in wiping out indigenous forces.

Another thing to consider is that European guns sucked during that time period. Bows and arrows and other native weapons were probably very competitive.

I recommend Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which did a few episodes [0] examining the questions of human sacrifice and ritual human cannibalism. The episodes were a companion to Daniele Bolelli's "History on Fire" episodes [1] about the first contact between the Spanish and the Mexica (Aztecs), but whereas Bolelli focuses more on the narrative drama of the events of these two incompatible cultures clashing, Cooper's episodes are more psychological explorations about the human condition that try to examine just where in our human minds arises these primal urges toward cannibalism and sacrifice of other humans and how early cultures dealt with the trauma of it in the form of rituals.

There's a progression to it too, where cultures tend to move between different phases (cannibalism to human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to purely symbolic sacrifice) where those 'psychic urges' can be played out in more and more abstract ways. It's reminiscent of Dan Carlin's episode about gladiators and public executions [2] and how our modern culture still wants to see the violence but to have it be virtual.

The MartyrMade podcast's analysis does a great job of juggling the two opposing ways of looking at these cultures. On one hand there is a human universality in that every culture and every people almost certainly has cannibalism and human sacrifice somewhere in its deep past. On the other hand, it's too easy for us in modern Western societies to try to interpret these other cultural behaviors in rational ways as if deep down they're just like us. Culture shapes its participants fundamentally; truly alien ways of being are the norm.

You can't read the account [3] of a young women ritualistically standing in for a Maize Goddess, being beheaded, flayed, and having her too-small skin being stretched and worn by a priest dancing before a crowd without being reminded of the quote "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." When people talk about the "cultural iceberg" [4], this exemplifies just how deep those icebergs go; it's not just language and food and dress and dance.

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[0] http://www.martyrmade.com/tag/human-sacrifice/

[1] http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/?tag=Aztec

[2] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-61-blitz-...

[3] http://www.bartleby.com/196/146.html

[4] https://sokokisojourn.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/the-cultur...

Why "sacrifice" and not murder?

> "People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains.

But then:

> isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire

To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine. Isn't it more likely, they were taken by force?

It's always strange when we assume ancient people would necessarily be superstitious; maybe some were, and some weren't.

Isn't it reasonable to think that mass killing would be a punishment inflicted on one group to another, following, say, a long war, or simply a conquest?

I certainly don't know the answer in this case, but to understand why sacrifice might be rational, you have to really contort your thinking and imagine your cost vs. benefit analysis when depriving your thought from centuries of advances in philosophy of science:

For the early humans many things obvious to us now were simply not known. The idea of an omnipotent sun god who controls the seasons isn't a priori crazy or anything. Why would it be? The normalization of how the solar system works only seems rational now because it's been scientifically presented to us.

In that sense a prediction that some entity controls this phenomena isn't necessarily superstitious. It's a fine prediction. But how do we get from there, to sacrifice?

Well, if we don't understand the mechanism of action for how these systems work, we can still try to make inference on them using statistics. For example: Sacrifice someone, then observe if anything changes. Before anyone ever ran this experiment, it's not obvious it wouldn't work. It's only obvious to us now because (a) we know the mechanism of action has no plausible link to human sacrifice, and (b) because people ran the experiment before, and it didn't work.

At the time, however, the benefit to this working would be huge, and the cost to society as a whole relatively small. This type of proto-statistical experimentation is, I think, what eventually led humanity to its core discoveries. In that sense we can't retroactively say the experiments that didn't work were superstitious or irrational, but the ones that did work were clever. For example, much of modern medicine arose from vast amounts of superstition and random experimentation.

> To accept to have your own child taken from you and cut open to offer its heart to some angry God supposes an amount of "faith" difficult to imagine.

abraham was willing.

He stopped himself though. But yeah, more likely it was a neighbor who stopped him.

He didn’t stop himself, according to the story, God intervened. He was willing To go the whole hog

Do you think it was what really happened? Guy hears the voice telling him to kill his son, then someone stops him.

I don’t believe any of Harry Potter really happened either, but that doesn’t mean I can arbitrarily claim the story is different from what it is.

Please, remind me how significant are fairy tales in the context of discussing actual children sacrifices? The fact (well, the fact in the story) is Abraham haven't killed its own son.

I'm sorry, I cannot interpret readers' reaction in any meaningful way. Did Abraham killed his own son? Or is it my mistyping of 'its own son'?

my comment that started this thread was admittedly of low quality.

to the extent that i am making a real point here, it is just that westerners should probably not find the idea of willing child sacrifice so bizarre/unbelievable when the common patriarch of judaism, christianity, and islam is portrayed as being totally devoted and willing in one of the faiths' most well known stories.

At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed between 10,000 and 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days.

"For many rites, the victim had such a quantity of prescribed duties that it is difficult to imagine how the accompanying festival would have progressed without some degree of compliance on the part of the victim. For instance, victims were expected to bless children, greet and cheer passers-by, hear people's petitions to the gods, visit people in their homes, give discourses and lead sacred songs, processions and dances." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...

The word "sacrifice" doesn't imply the consent of the person or animal being sacrificed

>Why "sacrifice" and not murder?

Words are tools. Which label is more descriptive in this context?

I think we have to be careful of reading the morality of our own culture into others.

That might sound glib but we have plenty of evidence even in our time of parents killing their children or allowing others to kill their children to save them from prophesied doom.

> Why "sacrifice" and not murder?

The two terms aren't mutually exclusive (though the latter refers to unlawful intentional killing, and that probably doesn't apply here accept by importing foreign moral codes as law.)

And, in any case, “sacrifice” is used for things destroyed as offerings to supernatural entities irrespective of their value outside of that purpose for the people destroying them.

The Nazis deliberately murdered children by the thousands, but nobody would call those “human sacrifices”.

Incidentally, that's what "Holocaust" means, and why many instead use the word "Shoah."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust

> The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering," or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god."

> In Judaism, Shoah (שואה), meaning "calamity" in Hebrew, became the standard term for the 20th century Holocaust[2] (see Yom HaShoah). This is because 'Holocaust' connotes a sacrifice, and Jewish leaders argue there was no sacrifice.

Do 'Nakba' and 'Shoah' share an etymology?

Their etiologies are mixed, at least.

Wow. TIL.

I bet you can find literary or sociological texts that y’all about those as sacrifices to some modern diety concept.

But that's my point. Are you concurring or disagreeing?

From some information in the article, it seems possible to me that the mass sacrifice might have been a cruel pacification technique by the conquering Inca? It says the Chimu empire fell around 1475 to the Inca. The rope and textiles were radiocarbon dated to 1400 to 1450 AD.

The movie Apocalypto comes to mind, where that is essentially the plot of the movie. I think you're probably right.

How did they get red pigment on the kid's skull?

It started out on the skin. The skin decomposed but the red pigment remained to settle on the skull.

We're talking about an archeological find dated roughly 3500 years ago. Within the same span of time, human sacrifice was practiced in parts of Europe as well. Few of us use that fact as an opportunity to spread rumors that the modern-day Italians or Welsh continue to do so.

Vowel sacrifice is still practiced in the open in Wales.

We must have read different articles. The one I read said it was dated around 1450AD.

Ah, you're right. I must have mixed it up with something else I was reading; that article (someone posted it on Fb) sent me off on a reading jag.

My point stands! But, like, an order of magnitude attenuated.

It's an important order of magnitude. We are talking about religion here, and among other things, religions are tools for transmitting cultural knowledge and practices down through centuries and millenia. 550 years is not really such a long time for a religion.