'Massive (Aztec) Funeral Complex' Unearthed

[Story]

'Massive Funeral Complex' Unearthed

By Miguel Angel Gutierrez

,

Reuters

MEXICO CITY (Feb. 11) - Archeologists have found a mass grave in Mexico City with four dozen human skeletons laid out in neat lines that could reveal clues about the 16th century Spanish conquest that killed millions.

Archaeologists in Mexico City announced Tuesday that they've found a "massive funeral complex" likely dating back to the 16th century. The grave, seen above, was unearthed in the capital's Tlatelolco area, which was once a political and religious center for the ancient Aztec elite.

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The investigators found the 49 skeletons, all lying face up with their arms crossed, as they searched for a palace complex in the Tlatelolco area, once a major religious and political center for the ancient Aztec elite and now a district in the north of the sprawling Mexican capital.

"We were completely taken by surprise. We didn't expect to find this massive funeral complex," Salvador Guilliem, in charge of the site for the government's archeology institute, said when the discovery was announced on Tuesday.

Historians think the Aztecs built Tlatelolco in the early 1300s along with the nearby city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and now the heart of Mexico City, which the Spanish founded after they conquered the Aztecs in 1521.

It is likely the indigenous people buried in the grave died in battle against the invading Spanish or fell victim to diseases that wiped out large swaths of the native population in 1545 and 1576, Guilliem said.

Many Aztec fighters died resisting the Spanish invasion and millions also perished during a four-year epidemic of hemorrhagic fever that began in 1545, killing 80 percent of indigenous Mexicans.

The 13-by-32-foot burial site differs from other conquest-era graves because of the reverential way the bodies were buried, following Christian customs of the time, unlike thousands of contemporary graves at other Aztec cities where bodies were thrown in at random.

"It is a mass grave, but they were very carefully buried," Guilliem said.

The burials were likely ordered by Spanish overlords but carried out by Aztecs since most of the artifacts found around the bodies, such as copper necklaces and bone buttons, are from pre-Hispanic cultures, he said.

The skeletons of two children, a teenager, and an old person wearing a ring that could signify higher status, were found along with 45 young adults in the tomb.

The scientists expect to find at least 50 more bodies as excavations continue at the massive Tlatelolco complex, home to 67 ancient structures, including massive pyramids.

"The discovery is filling us with more questions than answers at this point," Guilliem said.

Mexico mass grave may be Aztec resistance fighters

By MARK STEVENSON

AP

MEXICO CITY -Archaeologists digging in a ruined pyramid in downtown Mexico City said Tuesday they found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the Aztec holdouts who fought conquistador Hernan Cortes.

The unusual burial holds the carefully arrayed skeletons of at least 49 adult Indians who were buried in the remains of a pyramid razed by the Spaniards during the 1521 conquest of the Aztec capital.

The pyramid complex, in the city's Tlatelolco square, was the site of the last Indian resistance to the Spaniards during the monthslong battle for the city.

Archaeologist Salvador Guilliem, the leader of the excavation for Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the Indians might have been killed during Cortes' war or during one of the uprisings that continued after the conquest.

Guilliem said many burials have been found at the site with the remains of Indians who died during epidemics that swept the Aztec capital in the years after the conquest and killed off much of the Indian population.

But those burials were mostly hurried, haphazard affairs in which remains were jumbled together in pits regardless of age or gender.

The burial reported Tuesday is different. The dead had many of the characteristics of warriors: All but four were young men, most were tall and several showed broken bones that had mended.

The men also were carefully buried Christian-style, lying on their backs with arms crossed over their chests, though many appear to have been wrapped up in large maguey cactus leaves, rather than placed in European coffins.

The mass grave contained evidence of an Aztec-like ritual in which offerings such as incense and animals were set alight in an incense burner, but Spanish elements including buttons and a bit of glass also were present.

Susan Gillespie, an archaeologist at the University of Florida, said the grave was unusual, both because it was unlikely the Spanish would have bothered with such careful burial of Aztec warriors, and because the Indians themselves would have been more likely to cremate any honored dead.

But Gillespie, who was not involved in the excavation, also noted that little is known about the period immediately following the fall of the city, when Cortes razed most pyramids and temples, then abandoned the largely destroyed metropolis. He lived on the city's outskirts before returning to rebuild a Spanish-style city on the ruins.

It may have been in that interim period after Cortes left that the Aztecs returned to bury their dead, Guilliem said.

Gillespie agreed the burials could be those of disease victims or rebellious Indians from later years, rather than warriors who fell in the 1521 battle, and said more research was needed, such as a skeletal analysis to show cause of death.

Another possibility, she said, was that the men could have been held by the Spanish for some time and killed later. That was the fate that befell the leader of the Aztec resistance, emperor Cuauhtemoc.

[Patrick Hand]

Hummm... that's interesting....

How did the Aztec normally bury their bodys.... something about their arms being folded over their chest sounds so much like a Christian burial.....

It will be interesting to find out more....

[blackjohn]

Have you ever read Bernal Diaz's account of the Conquest of Mexico? Fascinating. I never got around to finishing it, but the stuff I remember reading was incredible.

[Black Syren]

More on Aztec burial beliefs...

http://www.deathreference.com/A-Bi/Aztec-Religion.html

[Patrick Hand]

Black Syren , that link didn't work for me....

Me an' me morbid mind ....found a reference to the Aztec's priest practicing cannibalisms.... Something about how the bones had cut marks/scratches on them.... is kinda made sense, but I can't find the reference again....... Of course they won't admit to it... but I thought it was interesting.....

[Black Syren]

Drat..Ill see if I can find it again for you Patrick. There were sacrafices, cannabiism, depending upon how you died in your life decreed what God you went with in the afterlife and there were diffrent burial rights for each God. These included cremation, mummification and sometimes they were sent with their slain dogs.

EDIT:::::: Aztec Religion

Try that Patrick...

[John Maddox Roberts]

According to Bernal Diaz the arms and legs of sacrificed humans were cut off, cooked and eaten. It sounds grotesque but undoubtedly was a religious practice (though providing some high-quality protein as well.) Some claim that it was Spanish propaganda, but I doubt it. Diaz himself describes the condition of Tenochtitlan at the end of the seige that destroyed it, and says that every room left standing was absolutely stuffed with corpses of the defenders and their families, yet the few still able to fight were starving and emaciated, despite the abundance of flesh. To them, eating the flesh of people who had not been properly sacrificed was as repugnant as cannibalism to us. If the Spanish were propagandizing, why not claim that the Aztecs were unredeemable cannibals to the end? The Aztecs had a culture so alien to ours that in some ways they seem like people from another planet, yet it had limitations and taboos as strict as any of ours.

[Salty]

fasinating subject, as a used to be archeaologist, thier culture was not totally alien to ours, it fit thie times and nature of the land. our modren society has lost the connection to the land and gods that our ancestors held.

as to cannabilism, it makes more sense to make your prey walk back to camp then to run it down, kill it, and drag it back. At least the cases of sacrifice were not done just for the sake of eating human flesh. It may not make sense to us now, but it ran thier wolrd then and kept tham as safe as any set of beliefs does.

Thanks for the article.