Blood Tribute, Earth Offerings, and the Formative Origins of Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica has long been identified with a range of ritualized practices or ritual diversity centered on both animal and human sacrifices. In efforts to situate the ideology of blood tribute and its corollary demography of carnage, investigators have been challenged to ascertain and define specifically what constitutes prima facie bioarchaeological and forensic evidence for human sacrifice. This is in contradistinction to the ritual or other utilitarian treatment of postmortem remains. The preponderance of the evidence, as well as that scholarship devoted to its analysis and interpretation, has long been focused on the iconographic evidence for such practices evident from the Postclassic Period (900–1521 CE). A host of recent revelations from both highland and lowland Mesoamerica make clear the antiquity and inherent eclecticism borne of that evidence recovered from across a range of societies and socioeconomic, political, cosmological, and cultural contexts. Drawing on a host of recent studies to guide our survey, we review both the time depth and diversity of sacrificial practices increasingly evident across the span of Mesoamerican time and space. We have since discerned Archaic and Formative era patterns of ritualized human sacrifice borne of the available bioarchaeological, contextual, and cross-cultural contexts under consideration. Our assessment, therefore, is predicated on the condition and disposition of mutilated and/or culturally modified human remains that coincide with that of later accounts from the ethnohistorical record.