Large holes were then bored into the sides of the skulls and placed onto a large wooden pole prior to being placed in the tzompantli - a towering rack of skulls in the front of the temple.
Two columns of decorative mortar skulls were placed either side of the real ones to honour the gods and scare off potential enemies.
Paintings and written descriptions from the early colonial period have long documented the macabre site. One historical report claimed one rack contained more than 130,000 real skulls.
It’s funny, eh? “History is written by the winners” and yet the fact that the winners were righteous in taking down an empire that literally practiced mass human sacrifice is completely forgotten.
I call it “the myth of the peaceful native”, people like to gloss over the brutality of these civilizations and only focus on the convenient positives.
The Maori in New Zealand are a particularly humorous example. If you hear people talk about Maori today, you’d think they were peaceful forest druids who lived in gentle harmony with the world around them until the evil white man showed up and ruined everything.
Yet the Maori were one of the most fiercely warrior cultures to ever exist. They were absolutely ferocious, slaughtered each other at every opportunity, hunted the Moa to extinction, cannibalism was a thing, etc. Everything about Maori culture revolves around war, from their art to their artifacts. I say this with admiration, it’s an impressive culture. Technology wise they were also in the stone age.
Were they better off left to slaughter each other with stone age weapons in the forest, or has civilization been a good thing?
“We were warriors!” huh, what do they do? “Well they waged war!” Oh neat! Against whom?
Yeah, no kidding.
🤣 Yeah
