THE 63 SKELETONS WERE ARRANGED IN THE Myth or reality? · Myth or reality? It doesn’t take a...
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THE 63 SKELETONS WERE ARRANGED IN THE
sealed death pit like actors on an eerie stage
set. Just outside the King’s Grave, archae-
ologists found six soldiers lined up, still
wearing helmets and “guarding” the royal
tomb. Beside them were two ox-drawn carts
with drivers, grooms, and oxen lying nearby.
Rows of men and women lined the passage
to the tomb, and courtesans with elaborate
golden headdresses sat in a circle around a
set of musical instruments. This was a “the-
atre of public cruelty,” enacted at the death
of a Sumerian ruler about 4500 years ago in
ancient Mesopotamia, according to an ini-
tial report by Leonard Woolley, the Brit-
ish archaeologist who excavated the royal
tombs of Ur in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s.
Woolley concluded in 1934 that these
courtesans and servants had drunk some
“deadly or soporifi c drug” from cups and a
large copper cauldron he found in the pit.
Most scholars accepted his account that the
victims had gone willingly to their deaths, to
serve their ruler in the netherworld.
So, when three researchers at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania (Penn) Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadel-
phia took their fi rst look recently at computed
tomography scans of two skulls from the
death pit, they got a big surprise. “Holy cow!”
said paleoanthropologist Janet Monge when
she saw unmistakable radiating fractures
from a blow to the side of a skull. This wasn’t
a case of mass suicide à la Jim Jones, but the
ritual murder, or sacrifi ce, of
63 humans.
The Penn team proposed in
a report in Antiquity last year
that the retainers “were felled
with a sharp instrument, heated, embalmed
with mercury, dressed and [only then] laid
ceremonially in rows.” The ornaments and
helmets had obscured the damage from the
mortal blows for decades.
This new look at the victims of Ur is one
of a fl urry of multidisciplinary studies that
has recently documented a macabre trail of
human sacrifi ce that leads to every corner of
the world, from the death pits of Ur and China
to burials atop the highest peaks of the Andes.
Using rigorous forensic and bioarchaeolog-
ical methods, researchers have been able to
reconstruct victims’ last days and hours, and
sometimes their identities, testing contro-
versial claims of human sacrifi ce. “This is
an exciting time for this kind of research,”
says biological anthropologist John Verano of
Tulane University in New Orleans.
Researchers are finding that although
human sacrifi ce was not frequent in most cul-
tures, it was pervasive, taking place at one
time or another in just about every ancient
civilization in which someone had the rank
and power to decide who died, Verano says.
Although human sacrifi ce was seen as bar-
baric by classical times, it persisted in Rome,
the Americas, and elsewhere until the rise
of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions
that condemned it. Across cultures, most
cases shared twin motivations: to please the
gods, and to vividly assert and display rul-
ers’ power. For early states, whose rulers were
consolidating power, ritual sacrifi ce seems
to have been one way to discourage outside
attacks and internal revolt by sowing fear.
The cross-cultural data are beginning to give
researchers an idea of “key patterns in the ori-
gins, motivation, and methods of [sacrifi ce],”
says bioarchaeologist Haagen Klaus of Utah
Valley University in Orem.
Myth or reality?It doesn’t take a scholar to guess from the
friezes of Roman temples, images on Maya
pots, or scenes in ancient Greek plays
that our ancestors might have sacrificed
one another. Historical accounts—from
Herodotus in Greece and Pliny the Elder in
Rome to Spanish priests in the Americas—
recount sacrifi ces made by
the Scythians, Etruscans,
Romans, Incas, Aztecs, and
Norse. Engraved labels on
ancient Egyptian jars sug-
gest that some early rulers took servants and
concubines with them to the next world. Art
on ceramic urns show a Maya god “sitting
down to a plate of human hearts, just like
a Maya king would eat a plate of tamales,”
says bioarchaeologist Andrew Scherer of
Brown University.
Although depictions of ritualistic decapi-
tation and dismemberment are found in the
art and literature of many societies, convinc-
ing physical evidence has been rare until
18 MAY 2012 VOL 336 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 834
Seeking to impress both gods and humans, early state societies across the globe
displayed their power by ritually killing human victims
Royal prerogative. An artist’s impression of the death scene in a royal tomb at Ur from The Illustrated London News in 1928.
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SPECIALSECTION
recently. “People didn’t really look at marks
of perimortem violence, so they didn’t see the
evidence,” says bioarchaeologist Vera Tiesler
Blos of the Autonomous University of Yuca-
tán in Mexico.
This led some researchers to challenge the
claims for human sacrifi ce in general and in
Mesoamerica in particular. “I don’t think that
what we say is human sacrifi ce is anything
other than [deaths in] war,” says archaeolo-
gist Elizabeth Graham of University College
London, who studies Maya sites in Belize.
She notes that victims are often captives taken
in war. “All societies have socially sanctioned
killing,” she says, citing the Holocaust of Ger-
many as a particularly grievous recent exam-
ple. “The poor Aztecs have been made out to
be the most brutal people in the world, but if
it’s actually warfare, they killed few people.”
Researchers agree that iconography
and texts alone can’t confi rm sacrifi ce. For
example, ethnographic accounts claim that
the Aztecs slaughtered 80,000 war captives
when dedicating the Great Pyramid of Teno-
chtitlan in 1487, but
this is widely consid-
ered an exaggeration.
However, in the past
15 years, researchers
at Aztec sites have
excavated sacrifi cial
knives and stones,
some with traces of
human blood, as well
as bones with cut
marks and signs of
heart extraction. This
has “led us to con-
clude without a doubt
that human sacrifi ce
was a basic practice
of Aztec religion,”
says Leonardo López
Luján of the Templo
Mayor Museum at
the National Institute
of Anthropology and
History in Mexico
City. At Tenochtitlan,
his team found 47
decapitated bodies
and 42 children with
slit throats.
So many new
cases of sacrifice have been documented
in the past decade that researchers classify
them informally. There are retainer burials
where slaves die with their owners; offerings
of prized children; dedicatory burials that
are a sort of bloody feng shui to bless build-
ings, such as Tenochtitlan during construc-
tion; and ritual killings of captives from war.
The difference between these deaths
and other state-sanctioned killings is that
sacrifi ce is ritualistic. Researchers add
that they aren’t targeting any particu-
lar society; indeed, a major finding
is that human sacrifi ce was found in
most emerging city-states around the
world, particularly under a new ruler or
in times of crisis. At the same time, it
was relatively rare within populations.
“Not everyone gets a sacrifi ce at their
funeral,” Scherer says. Klaus agrees:
“There’s not a lot of trauma in the popula-
tions at large. But a special subset of people
did die extremely brutal and violent deaths at
a variety of sites.”
Loyal subjectsRetainer sacrifi ce, as at Ur, was apparently
performed so that rulers could live in the
afterlife much as they did in life, and to dem-
onstrate their impor-
tance to the living.
“It’s not a sacrifi ce in
the sense of slaugh-
tering a cow or offer-
ing meat” to a god,
says Penn archaeolo-
gist Richard Zettler.
At Ur, the court atten-
dants were set up as
though they were at
a banquet with food,
drink, and music.
They were adorned in
golden wreaths stud-
ded with lapis lazuli
and carnelian.
But did those
who died really play
the roles of guards,
grooms, and courte-
sans in life? Stron-
tium isotopes in
bones and teeth show
that two retainers at
Ur were born locally
and were not foreign
captives, suggesting
that they were indeed
servants, says Penn
archaeologist Aubrey Baadsgaard.
Such extravagant retainer sacrifi ces were
rare. At Ur, the practice appears in only 16 out
of about 2000 graves unearthed in the Royal
Cemetery. But it also occurs in Egypt, at the
tomb of King Aha in Aby-
dos, in 2900 B.C.E.; and in
China in the 2nd millennium
B.C.E. when kingship had just
been established, says archaeologist
Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore, Maryland. “When you estab-
lish a new kingdom, a new kind of political
organization with a ruler at the top, very often
there is this strategy of making a big show of
the power of this new social order by having
this kind of retainer sacrifi ce,” Schwartz says.
At Ur, the number of sacrifi cial victims
and wealth of the treasures declines from
about 2600 B.C.E. to 2450 B.C.E. The prac-
tice also declines and then vanishes in Egypt,
perhaps because it was too costly to bury
such wealth, both in objects and human life,
or because established kings didn’t need such
a conspicuous display of power.
The Maya also practiced a form of retainer
sacrifi ce in which some victims were chil-
dren. In 2010, Brown University archae-
ologist Stephen Houston and his colleagues
found six blood-red cache vessels beside a
king’s body in an airtight chamber of the El
Diablo pyramid in the jungle near El Zotz,
Guatemala. Interred in about 350 C.E., the
caches contained the heads, teeth, and bod-
ies of six children, aged 6 months to 5 years.
The smallest were stuffed in the bowls whole,
but the older children had been dismembered.
Feast for the gods. The Maya
offered bowls with the heads,
teeth, and bodies of children
and adults at the El Diablo pyr-
amid in Guatemala.
Death of a child. The Inca cut open this Muchik child’s chest and removed the heart about 500 years ago.
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Several had been ritually burned around the
face and chest with low heat.
This matches previously known Maya ico-
nography, showing children burning in large
bowls with their hearts cut out, Scherer says.
Such sacrifi ces “don’t
seem to have anything
to do with warfare,”
Scherer says. “The
Maya are replicating
myths, with scenes of
child sacrifice to the
maize god.”
Sacrifi cial lambs Children were vic-
tims in other cultures,
too, perhaps because
they are often seen
as the most precious
offering. The Inca,
for example, built
platforms high in
the southern Andes,
where they held
mountaintop cere-
monies called capa-
cocha, in which they
sacrificed beautiful,
unblemished children.
For example, a 15-year-old girl called
the Llullaillaco Maiden was discovered in
1999 with a 7-year-old boy and a 6-year-
old girl atop the 6739-meter-elevation
Volcán Llullaillaco in northwest Argentina
(http://scim.ag/LMaiden). The children
were buried about 500 years ago, with gold
and silver fi gurines. Two had headdresses of
white feathers; one, a silver bracelet. Their
youth and rich gifts suggest they were not
captives of war, says archaeologist Johan
Reinhard of the National Geographic Soci-
ety in Washington, D.C.
The children were apparently treated well,
consistent with ethnographic records sug-
gesting that it was an honor to be chosen for
this sacrifi ce. Stable isotopes from the Maid-
en’s hair showed that her diet changed dra-
matically about a year before death, from a
peasant’s diet to one suddenly rich in meat
and maize, an elite food; her diet shifted to
more grains a few months before her death, as
she trekked to the peak. “Children were spe-
cially selected and treated royally perhaps a
year before they were taken up to the moun-
taintop,” Verano says.
Child “sacrifi ce doesn’t mean giving up
those you don’t like,” Klaus says. “It’s giv-
ing up those that matter the most.” And the
Inca may not have thought of their children
as dying. “In this very sacred mountain
environment, they’d be seen as living with
the gods,” Reinhard says. “They would, in
essence, become deifi ed.”
And yet even Inca priests may have had
an eye to impressing other humans as well
as the gods, says bioarchaeologist Tiffi ny
Tung of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The feting of the children en route to the
peaks and the hubris of staging sacrifi ces
at such lofty heights would have inspired
awe and fear, helping the Inca assert power
over their vast empire,
Reinhard says.
Captive audience There are many instances
of reverential child sac-
rif ice, but researchers
agree that killing captives
after battle may have
been the most common
kind of human sacrifi ce.
Performed by cultures
as diverse as the Aztec,
the Wari, and the Shang
Dynasty in China, this
practice involves more
than merely disposing of
captives, those who study
it insist. It is designed to
shock and awe both ene-
mies and subjects.
For example, in the 1980s, Chinese
researchers uncovered 14 skulls in a row,
including one placed inside a bronze food
steamer, in the royal cemetery of Anyang,
the capital of the ancient Shang dynasty
in east-central China. The researchers
assumed the skull fell into the pot by
accident. Then in 1999, another skull
turned up in a steamer in a tomb in a later
Shang capital, according to archaeolo-
gist Tang Jigen of China’s Academy of
Social Sciences. This “leads us to the
inescapable conclusion that the Shang
people did indeed have the cruel custom
of steaming human heads,” he said in a
recent publication.
Anyang fi ts the profi le of cultures that
sacrifi ce captives: At about 1200 B.C.E.,
it was the center of the country’s first
expansive power. Archaeologists found
up to 15,000 sacrificial victims during
digs in the 1930s and 1950s, and are now
examining them in detail. Most are men
of military age who were decapitated,
Jigen says.
The men’s arms and legs were fre-
quently cut off in similar ways, suggest-
ing they were killed ritually rather than in
battle, and the human remains are mixed
with animal bones. Few pits contain
goods such as pottery that are included in
typical burials. Shang oracle bones provide
hints of sacrifi cial procedures: One inscrip-
tion made on a defl eshed skull mentions the
decapitation of an enemy leader.
The deaths may mark the ritual kill-
ing of war captives in order to provide food
or slaves to ancestors, says archaeologist
Roderick Campbell of New
York University, noting that
the pits often contain remains
of cattle, dogs, grain, wine,
and other material commonly
used in sacrif ices. Later
dynasties did not continue the
penchant for sacrifi ce, about
which later Chinese annals
are silent.
Halfway around the
world, the iconography of
the Moche of northern Peru
also suggests brutal sacrifi ce
of war captives, done in ways
that highlight the victor’s
power. Images show cap-
tives being paraded naked
with bloody noses before
a warrior priest and having
their throats slit. But until the
Trophy head. The Wari of Peru made a trophy of this captive foreigner’s head in a highly ritualized process.
Mountaintop maiden. This 15-year-old Inca girl was sacrifi ced atop Volcán Llullaillaco in Argentina 500 years ago.
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SPECIALSECTION
1990s, some researchers thought that such
scenes depicted Moche mythology or staged
drama, not reality.
The overwhelming bioarchaeological
evidence of hundreds of sacrif icial vic-
tims, gathered since the 1990s, contradicts
that view, Verano says. For example, the
remains of more than 100 young men in a
Moche plaza at the pyramid of Huaca de la
Luna were either left exposed on the surface
to be buried by windblown sand, or
were incorporated in the fi ll of pla-
zas during their construction around
500 C.E., Verano says. Analysis of
the remains suggests these victims
were captives brought back from bat-
tle, as they had wounds that had par-
tially healed. Patterns of cut marks
on the neck vertebrae and other
bones confi rm they were decapitated
and that their bodies were defl eshed.
This was, Verano says, a “prominent
display of military victory.”
The study of sacrifi ce is also illu-
minating the politics and social struc-
ture of ancient societies. For exam-
ple, researchers knew that after the
Moche collapsed, their descendants, the
Muchik, were ruled by another culture, the
Sicán. Both cultures practiced sacrifi ce. But
the details suggest that the Sicán governed
loosely, Klaus says, because the Muchik still
killed victims, often children, the traditional
Moche way: The children’s throats were slit,
their chests were cut open to remove hearts,
and their bodies buried with long-standing
Moche funerary rituals. “It’s a Moche tem-
plate,” not a Sicán one, Klaus says.
In other cases, researchers are using the
existence of human sacrifi ce to show that
certain cultures were more organized and
sophisticated than had been realized. For
example, a few scholars have suggested that
the Wari of central Peru were not a state-
level society. But Tung says their practices of
human sacrifi ce, found as early as 600 C.E.
to 1000 C.E. at Conchopata, suggest state-
level control and organization.
Tung and Kelly Knudson of Arizona State
University, Tempe, have analyzed stable iso-
topes in 72 Wari trophy heads, many of chil-
dren, and buried bodies. Of 29 properly bur-
ied bodies, all belonged to local people. But
almost all of the trophy heads came from
foreigners. This suggests that they were cap-
tives, according to a report last year in the
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
Captives were brought alive to Con-
chopata, beheaded, and then processed into
trophy heads in a “very systematic, very
standardized way,” Tung says. “They clearly
had a standardized tool kit for drilling holes
on the top of the head for the cord, so the
heads would be upright and facing forward
when displayed.” This matches drawings on
large ceramic urns, which show Wari war-
riors seizing prisoners and carry-
ing trophy heads. “This is impor-
tant, because it suggests you have
Wari state structures used to promote
this”—to coordinate the warriors, the
priests who made the trophy heads,
and the artists who depicted them on
urns, Tung says.
The practice suggests a state-level
society asserting its absolute author-
ity against outsiders, Tung says.
“Sacrifi ce is very orchestrated—it’s
not just death on the battlefi elds. It’s
a performance to demonstrate to your
internal community and outsiders
your absolute power.”
As more cases of sacrifi ce emerge,
some defy classifi cation. This suggests that
researchers have just begun to exhume the
myriad ways that humans killed each other
in the name of the gods and the state. “Our
ability to see sacrifi ce in the past was some-
what limited. Now we’re able to expand that
view,” Monge says. “I’d say we’re just com-
ing to realize in some measure the enormity
of the violence of humans against humans.”
–ANN GIBBONS
With reporting by Andrew Lawler.
Baptism by fi re. The Maya offered babies to their
gods, as shown in this mythological scene.
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Deep cuts. A captive Muchik sacrifi ced in
Peru suffered a series of deep cut marks on
his collar bone to extract his heart.
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The Ultimate SacrificeAnn Gibbons
DOI: 10.1126/science.336.6083.834 (6083), 834-837.336Science
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