guardian | One miniature sculpture resembles something not quite human, and
instead has “an angel’s face on one side and a demon with goat horns on
the other”, the researchers said.
Sacrifice was not the end for the victims. Skeletons show the marks
of cuts consistent with flesh cleaved from bones, Martinez said,
suggesting that the townspeople ate not just the horses but the caravan
travelers as well.
Martinez could not be reached to describe evidence of cannibalism,
however, and other archaeologists cautioned that such claims were
sometimes founded in colonists’ accounts and not always supported by
material evidence.
Some of the human remains were placed around the site, as on a bone rack of skulls that
later greeted the avenging Spaniards sent by Cortes. In another case,
inside the pelvis of a woman who was sacrificed and dismembered in a
plaza, the Acolhuas placed the skull of a one-year-old child.
Only the pigs were spared the full treatment, apparently because they so baffled the native people.
“The pigs were sacrificed and hidden in a well, but there is no evidence they were cooked,” Martinez said.
When Cortes learned of the massacre he sent a force to destroy the
town and the Acolhuas. Martinez said the ruins of Zultepec-Tecoaque
suggest its inhabitants tried to quickly abandon and hide evidence of
the sacrifices by tossing the Europeans’ belongings in certain rooms and
in cisterns.
Archaeologists have found more than 200 objects, including a riding
spur, a brooch, rings, iron nails and glazed ceramic figurines, in 11
cisterns around the site, and plan to explore three more in the coming
months.
Cortes’ soldiers destroyed the town, but Acolhuas’ attempt to bury
remnants of the sacrifices actually helped preserve the evidence for
later archaeologists, Martinez noted.
The identification of indigenous allies in the Spanish caravan struck
Overholtzer as a telling sign of the complex world into which the
invaders marched.
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