Elizabeth Hill Boone

I hesitated a bit to review this pretty much out of lack of motivation.

The book consists of lectures presented at a conference in 1979 and subsequently published in 1982. The conference was originally intended to deal with all sorts of Mesoamerican ritual sacrifice but all the papers accepted dealt with human sacrifice, so the topic of the conference became exclusively human sacrifice. Groovy.

There was one lecture not subsequently included in the published book. I’ll get back to that later.

Overall the grim contents was quite interesting if somewhat gratuitous at times. There was within the gruesome text enough real science to make the thing worthwhile, plus I’m a sucker for man’s inhumanity to man stuff.

There is one article about “Memory Clothes” that would be some sort of new age rubbish except the actual empirical evidence presented clearly showed the value of mesoamerican clothing depicted in prehistoric painting and sculpture for making a strong case for cultural diffusion across tribes. The article was quite interesting, the presenter just had some odd preconceived notion they wanted to fit the data into.

There are graphic instructions and illustrations for the various proposed methods for ripping a living person’s beating heart out; whether victims were likely conscious or not, etc. What this adds to the store of human knowledge is beyond me but somebody has to get paid to do it.

In the end there is the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to deal with: cannibalism. It is touched on in several papers but ultimately there is a lot of pussy footing. The article presented during the conference that was not subsequently published was: Aztec Cannibalism: Ritual or Gastronomic?. Besides the tasteless (he he) title the implication given is the old protein versus ritual controversy. Did the Aztecs need the protein from human beings due of a lack of other protein sources in their environment? Scholars have been on both sides of this but the prevailing thought post 1980 seems to be that there was adequate game, etc. available in the Mesoamerican environment that necessity wasn’t a factor. However, nobody seems to be willing to address the next question which is, maybe they just acquired a taste for it. As I said, much beating around the bush was evident.

In the end a quite interesting guilty pleasure. BTW there were subsequent conferences.

Listening to The Professionals… (altro)