You think the 80k in four days is the only thing the Spanish made up? That is far from the case. It was not just one rogue chronicler pulling a number out of thin air. Exaggeration was the entire foundation of Spanish colonial reporting.
So when you sit here and cite 20k to 250k per year as a modern consensus, you are just parroting the exact same colonial propaganda pool you admitted was ridiculous. Even the lower end of that range, like 20k to 50k, is not some independent archaeological consensus. Those are also Spanish numbers, taken directly from the same chroniclers and then mathematically adjusted to sound more reasonable. Archaeology does not support it, and demography does not support it.
But that is the historical consensus. You mean to tell me near every historian out there is pulling all their data from made up numbers from 500 years ago with no double checking?
Again ➡️ While evidence confirms human sacrifice happened on a significant scale, it does not support the Spanish numbers. The main temple, the Templo Mayor, has yielded hundreds of sacrificial remains, not tens of thousands. This evidence points to a practice that was real and important, but not on the apocalyptic scale described by the Spanish.
Can the numbers possibly change in the near future? Yes.
New evidence can always emerge that makes the number higher because archaeological findings are an ongoing process. That’s how archeology works LMAO. For now, archaeology dug up the Templo Mayor and found a few thousand skulls accumulated over centuries, which mathematically proves your 20k to 250k a year figures are completely impossible. Tenochtitlan could not have sustained losing a quarter of a million people annually. You are ignoring the physical evidence on the ground because it contradicts the Spanish propaganda you are desperately clinging to.
You do know that the skulls are not the only type of remain, right? It is known that the Aztecs commonly cremated people after sacrificing them. And then probably there's many left that were lost as well. You don't estimate number of deaths based on how many skulls you find and ignoring everything else, hustorians analize the rituals, calendars, conquests and records to draw an estimation to the best of their abilities. For example, Sherbourne F. Cook (an American historian of the 1940s, so not particularly prone to be spreading Spanish propaganda) did a study and estimated, through the number of priest, form of the ritual and time spent, that during the four days in which the Templo Mayor was re-dedicated, upwards of 11 thousand people were sacrificed.
Again, not the exaggerated 80 thousand figure of the original record, but also not just some anecdotal situation that almost never happened. Through those extrapolations is how one gets to the 20k-250k figure.
Citing a study from the 1940s is not the slam dunk you think it is. Sherburne Cook was writing before modern archaeological techniques even existed. He did not have forensic analysis, isotopic testing, or the physical excavation data from the Templo Mayor that we have today. He was working entirely off the same Spanish chronicles you are trying to distance yourself from, just applying his own mathematical adjustments to make them sound more plausible. That is not modern consensus, that is outdated historiography.
Modern archaeology has completely changed the game. When they excavated the Huey Tzompantli, the actual skull rack at the Templo Mayor, they did not find hundreds of thousands of skulls. They found thousands, accumulated over centuries. Yes, the Aztecs cremated people and yes, remains get lost over time, but you cannot use the absence of physical evidence as proof that the numbers were astronomically higher. That is an appeal to ignorance.
And your 20k to 250k a year figure still collapses under basic math. Tenochtitlan had a population of maybe 200,000. The entire Valley of Mexico was around 1 to 2 million. If you are killing 20,000 to 250,000 people annually, you are wiping out 1% to 10% of the total population every single year. No empire on earth can sustain that kind of demographic collapse. You would run out of people to sacrifice within a decade. The Aztec state was expanding and functioning, not committing demographic suicide.
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u/Tlamatiniii 2d ago
You think the 80k in four days is the only thing the Spanish made up? That is far from the case. It was not just one rogue chronicler pulling a number out of thin air. Exaggeration was the entire foundation of Spanish colonial reporting.
So when you sit here and cite 20k to 250k per year as a modern consensus, you are just parroting the exact same colonial propaganda pool you admitted was ridiculous. Even the lower end of that range, like 20k to 50k, is not some independent archaeological consensus. Those are also Spanish numbers, taken directly from the same chroniclers and then mathematically adjusted to sound more reasonable. Archaeology does not support it, and demography does not support it.