"Head off our shoulders and eat our heart": religious sacrifices in Mayan culture

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Medical and archaeologist Vera Tiesler explores how the human body was woven into religion, tradition and politics in Mayan culture.

The Autonomous University of Yucatan in the Mexican city of Merida boasts one of the richest libraries on earth. However, on the shelves on the lower floor of the building that houses the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences, you will find quite a few books as such. The entire laboratory is lined from floor to ceiling with boxes labeled "Calakmul", "Pomuch" or "Xcambo" and other names of the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilization. Inside each box is a set of human bones.

Bodies from about two thousand graves are stored here, and another ten thousand units are registered in the database. The remains of a number of famous Mayan kings passed through this university room. The beggars, warriors, priests, scribes, lords, ladies and artisans of ancient times have all been studied in this laboratory.

And in the very center, surrounded on all sides by the remnants of long-gone civilizations, sits the bioarchaeologist Vera Tiesler. Over the past quarter century, Tiesler has earned a reputation as the world's leading expert on ancient Mayan remains, helping her uncover the secrets of their life and culture. On a cloudy November day, she takes out one of her favorite bones - a flat plate no bigger than a finger - and places it under a magnifying lens. Before us is the brisket of a young man who was probably sacrificed. The scientist points to a deep V-shaped incision running down the center of the ribcage and admires the craftsmanship of the man who left it.

“To do this, you need to have remarkable strength and know exactly where to strike,” she says. "Because after a few unsuccessful attempts, it would be a mess here."

Trained as a physician and archaeologist, Tiesler reads the history of the region from bones. By examining the ancient Mayan civilization from a medical point of view, she is changing the perception of this world by the scientific community. Tiesler puts in context some of the seemingly unusual Maya traditions and sheds light on the lives of key figures in that civilization.

After studying thousands of bodies, she realized how the Maya knowledge of human physiology became an organic part of their society - from birth to death. The way they molded the skulls of their children sheds light on their family traditions and spirituality. And her studies of numerous deaths suggest that sacrificial ritual was elevated to the level of high art - a hypothesis that challenges the popular view of the Mayan civilization as a society of peace-loving stargazers. Everywhere, Tiesler discovers a rich culture in which the human body has been deeply conditioned by religion, tradition and politics.

“I always look at things from a different angle,” says Tiesler. - Thus, they never lose their attractiveness. It serves as a kind of motivation for me to take action. In my opinion, this is extremely exciting."

Tiesler is an anomaly in Mexican archeology. She was born in Germany and studied in Mexico, where she has lived for several decades. Tiesler combines multiple cultures to help her build partnerships and discoveries in one of the most famous ancient civilizations.

“There are very few people with this skill,” says Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "It embodies a kind of global approach to knowledge, which creates the best conditions for people to work together, and everyone tries to show their best side."

Power of love

As a child, Tiesler, who grew up a quiet and bookish girl in a small German village near the border with France, did not leave the feeling that she was out of place. She just saw things differently. While her friends went to the movies on James Bond and admired his heroism, she was more interested in his steel-toothed antagonist named Jaws. And she dreamed of going on a journey.

This is why Vera went to Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She managed to avoid a hectic student life, and just a year later, in 1985, she graduated with honors. Tiesler then took some of the money she won in an art competition and flew to Mexico City for two weeks before returning to Germany for her medical degree. In Mexico City, she met a young doctor, a lover of archeology, who invited her to go with friends to the ruins of Teotihuacan, located near the city. A strong feeling flared up between the young people, and they spent the whole week winding thousands of kilometers across the Mayan region to visit all the sights - although the girl forgot to inform her parents about this, who, after a few days in panic, turned to Interpol.

“My acquaintance with Mexico passed in such a way that I could not help falling in love with it,” she says.

The young people planned to get married, but Vera's fiancé died suddenly in 1987, while Tiesler was studying medicine in Germany. She vowed to go to Mexico and do what her lover has always dreamed of - archeology. Against the wishes of her parents, she entered the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico ever since.

Tiesler graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Mexico and then received her PhD in Anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Then few people were interested in the bones of the ancient Maya; Mexican archeology placed more emphasis on temples, pottery, and jade masks. Those who studied bones usually collected only the most basic information.

“They thought they had done everything in their power. They measured them, recorded them, says Manuel Gándara, an archaeologist who oversaw Tiesler's work at the time and now collaborates with the National School of Monument Conservation, Restoration and Museography in Mexico City. "And then all of a sudden this lady says," Oh, but we didn't take tissue samples for analysis."

Tiesler developed a scientific direction that was gaining popularity in Europe at that time and went beyond the simple classification of bones, making attempts to restore the body that once consisted of them. It's about taphonomy. However, this practice was never applied to the ancient Mesoamericans. Tiesler began to look through the various collections of skulls collected in Mexican museums - it was this part of the body that she considered the most interesting. She was struck by the custom of giving the head of a person the necessary shape: for this, mothers tied tablets to the head of their young children in order to influence the growth of the skull.

This procedure did not cause any harm to the child and, most interestingly, was a widespread practice throughout the world. Archaeologists who study the Maya assumed that this practice had something to do with religion, but this was their knowledge.

Tiesler noted that certain regions have their own special skull shapes. After looking at several hundred skulls, she found that people who lived during the classical period (250-900) along the coast of modern Veracruz, as a rule, had vertical pear-shaped skulls, while the inhabitants of the lowlands - sloping and cylindrical, and off the coast of the Caribbean the seas of the head were wide and flat. Over time, this form became popular and dominated the Late Classical period.

Examining the drawings and bas-reliefs of that time and comparing them with the shapes of the skull, Tiesler came to the conclusion that this or that style was chosen in accordance with the tradition on the maternal side: as a rule, the children followed the style of the mother. Tiesler, along with other scholars, identified the possible cause of this phenomenon, drawing on the Mayan tradition in colonial times. According to the scientist, the ancient Maya considered children to be inferior people who risk losing their essence through several points in their skulls. Shaping the head into the desired shape allowed the Maya to hold this entity in place.

The life of kings

By the time Tiesler completed her doctoral dissertation in 1999, she had studied much of the ancient Maya culture in detail, and soon began excavating royal tombs. The ancient Mayan civilization stretched from the northern Yucatan Peninsula southward to present-day Honduras (an area the size of today's Egypt), and Tiesler has researched many of the important royals found over the past hundred years. She was part of a team of scientists who, between 1999 and 2006, studied the remains of Pakal the Great (or K'inich Janaab 'Pakal) of Palenque and his companion, the Red Queen. Tiesler found that their relatively luxurious lifestyle was the cause of premature osteoporosis, as evidenced by thinning bones. Meanwhile, the soft, delicious food that they ate throughout their lives kept their teeth in excellent condition.

Tiesler unearthed the bones of a king named Lord of the Four Sides Flint (or Ukit Kan Le'k Tok) Ek Balam, pictured with a double lip in his richest treasury. She discovered that the king's upper jaw was disfigured, and the teeth were dislocated and healed at different angles. Perhaps the king was stabbed in the face during the battle - after all, he was clearly exposing this injury.

Favorite kings of Tiesler are those whose excavations she oversaw from start to finish. For example, the Fire Claw (or Yukom Yich'ak K'ahk ') from the classic Serpent Dynasty. Serpents were a royal dynasty that migrated to the Mayan world in 560 and in 150 years created the most influential empire in Mayan history.

The first of these, the Heavenly Witness, was found in a rather modest grave, which he shared with a handful of other chosen warriors who died in battle. Tiesler had very little time to examine him, but she found that the king's skull was riddled with deep wounds - some of them appeared on top of previously healed ones. His left arm was disfigured by numerous heavy blows, and by the time of his death, when he was only over thirty, he could hardly use it. All this corresponds to the image of a brilliant military leader who took the royal city of Tikal and established the rule of the Serpents in the region - we know about him from many written fragments.

Now compare this find with the Fiery Claw, who came to power at the end of the Serpent's dominance in the region. When Tiesler and other researchers unearthed the king, they found that he was comfortably seated in his palace with a jade mask on his face, next to him were a young woman and a child sacrificed at the same time. After examining his bones, Tiesler discovered that he was a stout man, almost obese, who died at the age of 50. As in Pakal's case, his teeth showed that he had eaten soft foods like tamale all his life and drank a popular chocolate honey drink among the elites. On one of the bas-reliefs, he appears as an athletic man playing a Mesoamerican ball game. Meanwhile, Tiesler discovered that Fireclaw suffered from a painful ailment in which several vertebrae fusion occurs, which means that this game was extremely dangerous for him and the image most likely served the purposes of propaganda.

Sacrifice as a spectacle

Such details do not change the main historical line of the Maya, but they complement the characters of its characters and help to better understand their way of life.

Since 2000, when Tiesler became a professor at the Autonomous University of Yucatan, she has established herself as a leading bioarchaeologist in Mexico. Her laboratory has a database of 12,000 burials, with 6,600 of which she and her colleagues worked directly. In the University of Yucatan alone, the remains of more than two thousand people from ancient, colonial and modern times are stored, in the finding of most of them Tisler was directly involved.

Vera Tiesler has a unique position in the Mexican scientific community. After centuries of local antiquities - and with them scientific laurels - flew north, authorities became reluctant to allow foreign archaeologists to undertake major projects in the Mayan region. But Tiesler willingly works with experts in the United States, Europe, and Mexico, and publishes widely in English and Spanish.

She combines multiculturalism, a thirst for research and boundless energy. This combination came in handy when Tiesler plunged into her favorite topic: human sacrifice.

In 2003, while working in Champoton, on the Gulf Coast, three of her students discovered a group of bodies that appear to have been dumped. When Tiesler examined the bones, she found a sternum with deep, clear cut marks, indicating a deliberate, almost surgical procedure. The cuts were horizontal, hardly made in combat, and were later found in the same place on other bodies.

Tiesler turned to her medical knowledge. An experienced person, knowing what he is doing and acting quickly, might cut the chest, spread the ribs, and remove the heart while the victim is still alive. “Then the heart will jump out and jump,” she says.

According to Tiesler, these cuts represented more than just gruesome murder. Most likely, it was a spectacle, a kind of ceremony. Her observations echo a number of written records of the sacrifices of the Aztecs who lived 1300 kilometers from the region, they date back to the period of the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. This led her to the astonishing and confusing problem of understanding the physiology of human sacrifice. How was it done? And why?

Tiesler and her colleagues began to notice cuts on other remains as well - they seemed too precise to be considered accidental. Collecting them and comparing them with illustrations, the scientist began to notice similar precisely located marks on other bones - Tiesler saw in them signs of sophisticated rituals.

Images carved in stone in places such as the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza indicate that captives were beheaded in front of the crowd. If you cut off the head a few seconds before removing the heart, the organ will continue to pump blood as long as you hold it, says Tiesler. If you do the opposite, then you can feed the heart to its owner, this practice is also hinted at in ancient texts. Another procedure, after which the cut marks remain on other parts of the chest, can create a pool of blood in the victim's chest cavity that looks almost like a lake.

Tiesler's ideas are not universally accepted - there are those who consider the murders less staged - but Tiesler says they are in line with the Maya worldview. When she sits at her desk in a secluded corner in the center of the laboratory, surrounded by three-meter shelving that is lined with boxes of bones, she does not dislike the practice. On the contrary, she is delighted. These executions required practice and precision - they may have been perfected over generations - and they had to carry deep meaning.

According to her, the method of sacrifice was extremely important. At that moment, the victim acts as a kind of deity: I mean a glimpse of the divine in a human shell - this idea was characteristic of the Aztec culture and is documented. Thus, the executioners fed the victim not his human heart, but the heart of God.

Tiesler is not the first scientist to put forward this hypothesis. Sacrifice leading to divinity (expressed in either the executioner or the sacrifice) is well known in other cultures of the Americas. But her work reinforces the religious ideas characteristic of the so-called Hipe Totek sect, named after the Aztec god who, according to legend, wears human skin over his own.

According to Tiesler, during the postclassic period (950 to 1539), the Maya people practiced a variety of human sacrifices and body treatments, including making skull walls called tsompantli and stripping human skin to be worn on the body.

As disgusting as these murders seemed, they were flowers compared to other practices of the time. According to Tiesler, the wheel adopted in Europe looked much more terrible, which allowed torturers to break the bones of a criminal one after another, before exposing the victim to public display.

True, the descriptions of sacrifices offered by Tiesler do not suit everyone. Anthropologists once described the Maya as a purely peaceful civilization, and although this point of view has largely exhausted itself, many scientists are not ready to present them as bloodthirsty.

The history of archeology is full of distorted ideas about ancient cultures, which were promoted by scientists from powerful countries, and modern researchers with great caution approach issues such as sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was common among the colonialists to portray members of other communities as committing the most unimaginable atrocities - that was another argument in their favor,” says Estella Weiss-Krejci of the Institute of Oriental and European Archeology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "You always have to consider all possible scenarios, especially when you are not sure what exactly happened."

Weiss-Kreichi believes that human sacrifice was extremely rare in the Maya world and that the woman buried next to the Fireclaw was in fact a member of his family and died later. If the sacrifices described by Tiesler were so common, why, Weiss-Kreichi asks, we do not find hundreds of breasts with similar cuts. In her opinion, the sacrifices were relatively rare, varied and almost never repeated. In response, Tiesler points to numerous examples from her extensive burial database, but she says, given the number of posthumous mutilations and wet soils, we are lucky to have at least these in our possession.

Scientists respect each other, but Tiesler argues that Weiss-Kreichi is following a prudent, albeit erroneous, path. She says the local Maya were not affected by the terrible reality of their ancestors - at least not more than the descendants of fierce Romans or Vikings. Understanding another culture means studying its history as it is, without embellishment.

“For lack of understanding, we can believe that they are crazy or different from us. But they are just like us. We are all alike,”says Kadwin Pérez, a Mayan and graduate student at the Tiesler laboratory who grew up in a Mayan-speaking family.

Separated from the body of the head

Walking among the monuments of the ancient Mayan civilization with Tiesler is like being behind the scenes of an illusionist show; everything that you thought you understood before begins to look different. It was this feeling that did not leave us during our visit to Chichen Itza in November last year. Just behind the iconic step pyramid of El Castillo is the famous tzompantli, a carved stone platform that depicts hundreds of skulls and a range of various half-dead monsters of the underworld.

Tsompatli were skull racks in the form of several horizontal beams stacked one above the other, like a ladder. Decorated with skulls, they were popular with the Aztecs. Many experts have suggested that the tsompatli depicted in the Mayan culture are metaphorical and do not refer to a real event. Some go so far in their hypotheses that they say that the Maya did not take part in this practice at all.

Tiesler stops and examines the carvings. In Spanish drawings from colonial times, the tsompatli are often depicted with pure white skulls. Tiesler narrows his eyes. These are not clean skulls at all, she says, but heads that were recently cut off and adhered to by flesh. The sculptor even added cheeks and eyeballs to some of the skulls, while others appear more decayed. In addition, head shapes vary greatly, suggesting that most of the victims were foreigners, probably captured on the battlefield. It was not considered an honor to be sacrificed, as some scholars have suggested. This is a classic example of Tiesler's work that restores lost flesh to bones.

Chichen Itza has been the object of study by countless specialists, more than two million people visit this monument every year - every detail of its structures has been recorded, analyzed and discussed by experts - and yet it never occurred to anyone to look at these carved skulls like this made by doctor Tiesler.

Then we sit in a small hut for a traditional corn pie stuffed with chicken and spices and cooked in the ground, and a hot chocolate drink that has changed little since the local kings sipped it two thousand years ago. Tiesler is partnering with a local university in an effort to promote eco-tourism that benefits local communities. Maria Guadalupe Balam Canche, who cooked the dish as part of the month's Day of the Dead celebration, says she does not feel a direct connection to the nearby pyramid builders that attract tourists. This feeling is shared by many here. They were the ancient Maya - alien, distant, and perhaps unnecessarily violent.

Tiesler sees things differently. Cutting off a piece of the pie, she notes that eating meat cooked in the ground echoes ancient ideas about the kingdom of the dead. Locals usually remove the bones of their family members and clean them, just as Fire Claw once did. And during a rodeo, it is often customary here to rip out the heart of a dying calf as part of a show.

Centuries of Spanish and Mexican statehood have influenced the culture here, but the bones have remained the same. Tiesler, who also works with more modern burials, discerns a long arc of history that very few people see. In her library of bones, she can follow the rise and fall of empires, the successive hunger and epidemics, and can also tell about many, many lives.

When Europeans arrived on these shores, their priests burned the Mayan letters, and their diseases spread among the population. Almost everything that was recorded by the people who built these pyramids was lost, their libraries were destroyed. This is a gap that archaeologists are now trying to fill. And while we will never return their lost libraries, at least one woman in the world hopes to restore a complete picture of how these people lived using the only libraries we have left.