The European Invention of Aztec Human Sacrifice

European perspectives and Christian prejudices have profoundly influenced perceptions and interpretations of the ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America since the beginning of the Spanish conquest nearly 500 years ago. The sanguinary image of human sacrifice by heart extraction, followed by cannibalism, is omnipresent in the historical chronicles about the Aztec civilization and still dominant in contemporary scholarship. Sensationalist representations, propagated by popular scientific works, as well as by novels and films, have impacted the public at large until the present day. A critical analysis of the early colonial texts, however, provokes serious doubts about their veracity. It is time for a re-examination of such engrained stereotypes, not only to gain a better understanding of the indigenous cultural heritage, but also to assess how western ideas about other peoples in general are still under the spell of colonial propaganda.

Maarten Jansen is full professor of ‘Heritage of Indigenous Peoples (with focus on the Americas)’, specialized in the visual art, history and living culture of Mesoamerica. He is head of the department Archaeological Heritage and participates in the Research MA & PhD tracks ‘Archaeological Heritage in a Globalising World’ and ‘Religion and Society (in Native American Cultures)’. Teaching at Leiden University since 1980, he founded there the successful specialization in the archaeology and culture history of the Americas. His own work focuses on diverse aspects of Mesoamerican cultural heritage in past and present, including iconography, history, and ethno-archaeology, and involves research among the Mixtec people (Ñuu Dzaui) in Southern Mexico. Together with Dr. Ferdinand Anders (University of Vienna), Mrs. Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez (investigator / teacher of Mixtec language and culture, Leiden University) and other colleagues, Jansen has produced a series of interpretive studies of religious and historical pictorial manuscripts from ancient Mexico. He obtained funding for a series of research projects from Leiden University (Faculties of Humanities and Archaeology, Center of Non-Western Studies, and the Profile Area ‘Global Interactions’) as well as from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO, WOTRO). This has led to a series of PhD theses and postdoc studies under his supervision. Cooperation exists with the Centro Oaxaca of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico, as well as with several institutions and experts in Europe and North America.  Jansen has also a wide ranging experience in academic organisation: he served on many commissions, and on the Directive Board of the Faculty of Archaeology as Director of Education  (2000-2003) and as Dean (2003-2006).  In 1994 the Mexican government awarded him the commandership in the Order of the Aztec Eagle. In 2002 he received a special appointment from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In 2009 the State Government of Oaxaca, Mexico, awarded him the Medal of Merit ‘Andres Henestrosa’.  In 2012 Jansen received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for a large research project focusing on the religious meaning and social function of the Mesoamerican calendar.

Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez was born in the traditional indigenous community of Yuku Shoo, which belongs to the municipality of Chalcatongo, in the Southern Mixtec Highlands, State of Oaxaca, Mexico. She grew up as a monolingual speaker of the Mixtec language (Sahin Sau), who started to learn Spanish in school. She followed English courses in San Diego (Calif. USA). Later she worked as a hotel receptionist and tourist guide in Oaxaca City and as an international telephone operator in Mexico City. From 1975 onwards she became actively involved in research on Mixtec history and oral tradition, particularly in the interpretation of pictorial manuscripts (codices), working together with Maarten Jansen. Since 1980 she has been living in The Netherlands, while also returning regularly to Mexico. In the Netherlands she followed courses in the Dutch language and specialist seminars in the field of Mesoamerican studies at Leiden University, as well as the programme ‘Law, Development and Social Justice’ at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Simultaneously she participated in the emancipatory movement of Mexican indigenous teachers for bilingual-bicultural education, and was a representative of this movement in several sessions of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the U.N. in Geneva (in the 1980s and early 1990s). During the years 1986-1989 she was a member of the board of the Dutch foundation “MUSIRO”, which supported the cause of indigenous peoples. In continuation she acted as a consultant for the Italian non-governmental organisation Centro Regionale di Intervento per la Cooperazione (CRIC) on several developmental projects in indigenous communities in Mexico (1989-1998). In 1994 she was appointed as guest lecturer on Mixtec language and culture at Leiden University. In this context she developed a long-term project of documentation and analysis of Mixtec oral tradition. This implied interviewing people in the region, as well as taping, transcribing and analyzing Mixtec texts. With her considerable knowledge of the language and culture she has contributed significantly to the identification of signs, objects, customs and narratives in the pictorial manuscripts and has developed a heuristic method to reconstruct possible readings of scenes in the Mixtec pictographic manuscripts directly in the Mixtec language, using traditional terminology and ceremonial discourse. From 2001 onwards she worked at Leiden University as researcher in the projects Mixtec City-States, Sahìn Sàu: an Endangered Language of Southern Mexico, and Keeping the Days: Time and identity in Middle America (funded by NWO, the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research) and over the past years in the project Time in Intercultural Context: the Indigenous Calendars of Mexico and Guatemala (funded by the European Research Council). She is author of a course-book and a dictionary of the Mixtec language and of several articles on the situation of indigenous peoples in Mexico, as well as co-author of various books and articles on the interpretation of ancient Mixtec pictorial manuscripts and texts.