> Thank you all for your replies. I'll look up what i can find on the
Aztecs.
> (Flowers and virgins, well i guess i forgot that)
I've just been rapidly working my way through "The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings" by David Drew. This is a superb work, very accessible and a good introduction to the field as a whole. Its major angle is the rather recent progress in decifering Maya script and what this tells us, which is a fair amount. Its rather humbling to note that something like half of what we thought we knew up till the mid 60's was basically imaginary, one way or the other.
I'm not sure I can find much in the way of virgin sacrifice per se: the top selection appears to be enemy (hell, even friendly sometimes) VIP's, enemy warriors, enemy noncombatants in that order. There must have been domestic sacrifice, one would think - certainly there was ritual blood-shed by nobles for various ceremonies. But the point very much seems to be to kinda steal an enemy cities essence by "chopping" their rulers, that being the rather sanguine term employed on stelae. New rulers were expected to go on a "coronation war" to capture some suitably important person to "chop" on their pyramid; Drew speculates that the great ruler 18 Rabbit met his end on an expedition to find someone suitable to sacrifice during the dedication of a new ball-court (he was sacrificed by Cauac Sky, who had himself been enthroned by 18 Rabbit 13 years previously as the ruler of a subject city-state). The socio-political structure is very much of warring city-states and a sort of almost feudalism - some cities would have their own ruler enthroned "under the auspices of" the ruler of another city, and regional rulers would sometimes attend inaugaural ceremeonies of other rulers. Visits might have been more common, but we only have evidence for the politicoceremonial stuff. During the height of the classical period the scenario appears to have been a regional power struggle between Teotihauacan in the Mexican basin and two Yucatan cities, Tikal (Teotihauacans ally) and Calakmul, the "Empire of the Snake". However, these were not centralised powers but city-states with a network of subordinate cities paying tribute; the later Aztecs were much more centralised than the the Maya cities. At this point the regional population is probably in the region of 10 million with cities of 10's to 100's of thousands of people. There are plenty of "emblem glyphs" naming cities that we have not found yet, too, in the monuments of the cities we have found. Cities which became subject to others were occasionally destroyed, or had their stelae thrown down and temples burned, and sometimes placed under a sort of "construction ban", it would appear, although thats reading into the evidence. Anyway, sometimes cities stop building for hundreds of years; another theory might be that the population has been transported off as captives. There is also evidence of "dead" cities being practically and ritually reborn with an elaborate ceremony to an ancient founder, invoking his authority and power to legitimise a new dynasty. Throughout this all the Maya are essentially a stoneage society in technological terms, which rather challenges our usual use of the term, given their capacity to support large dense populations and transport high amounts of tonnage for trade, tribute or temple-building. Anyway, interesting stuff - a link to an excellent set of photos of mesoamerican architecture, sites and artefacts is:>
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