Yesterday I bought a local "popular science and history" magazine - think something like the equivalent of National Geographic Magazine only it turned up to be a bit more yellow than just around the borders. Their main article was about human sacrifice in the Aztec culture - it had the thesis that popular theories that conquistadors, guns, germs and steel were the main source of the Aztec downfall were not right, but instead the Aztecs' fascination with human sacrifice, death culture had driven them to kill off their own people in such huge numbers that they had basically sabotaged their society by the time conquistadors came, and this was the most important factor for their apparent weakness when meeting the conquistadors and giving in to the later triple-punch of guns, germs and steel.
Now I won't comment further on this article, because it became quickly apparent it's pretty garbage and they didn't want to cite any sources for many of their claims, had plenty of "recently historians have found" or "historians agree" and etc. blanket statements.
What incensed me most was a claim that "according to many historians today Aztecs sacrificed close to 250,000 people for a year in the whole empire". This cannot be, I thought, that's the most ludicrous claim of all in this article. I'm going to check on the internet where they sourced this crazy number from, and laugh at their poor researching skills...
Imagine the egg on my face when of the mish-mash of all unsourced facts in this article this turned out to be an actual estimation made in the 1970s by Dr. Woodrow Borah, an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley. Who among other estimations also considered that these 250,000 humans sacrificed a year made up about 1% of the population of the Aztec Empire at the time.
https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory86newy/page/n353 https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/19/archives/aztec-sacrifices-laid-to-hunger-not-just-religion.html#:~:text=by%20the%20Aztecs.-,Dr.,region's%20population%20of%2025%20million.
So here's my question - how accurate or inaccurate are considered today these estimations of a chilling number of human sacrifice victims? Do "many historians today agree" these are credible estimations? 40+ years have passed, surely there have been more findings about human sacrifice that either support this thesis or cast doubt over it?
A quick read through Wikipedia found the same 250k estimation repeated, plus one or two other wildly differing estimates, but no hint which one is considered more accurate by the majority of modern historians. If anyone can tell me if there is a consensus which is closer to plausible, and which is considered improbable, plus any sources and modern estimations - I would be forever thankful.
I think there was a response by u/Tlahuizcalpantecutli a few months ago specifically regarding Borah's numbers.
From what I've seen in recent arqueological digs though there seems to be a consistent pattern of finding between 90-150 individual remains in mayor arqueological sites in Mexico City in each site, considering religious Xiuhpoualli or hollidays (18 for every subdivision 20th in the Aztec calendar corresponding to a mayor deity and not all of which involved religious sacrifices of the deadly kind), and that the city was founded some 200 years before the conquest, I can sort of throw a crazy number/estimate that there would be something like 18-25? (and I think that would be somewhat exagerated) or so sacrifices a year, give or take for the damages of time,... maaaybe that could be doubled in times of war or natural disasters such as droughts? (one of which happened and is recorded as having increased the number of sacrifices), and maybe you could argue this wouldnt take into account war situations, but even then you would be looking at one or two... maybe three? dozen sacrifices, not hundreds of thousands.
The other aspect to consider is the practical and logical one, there is an argument for calculating the Aztec population at arouns 21-25 million inhabitants at the time of contact, some people go with 60 million people in Mesoamerica just before war and plague ravaged the continent so it sort of makes sense, but the Mexicans adopted the culture of human sacrifices from the neighboring and established civilizations, we have records of sacrifices being performed in places like Teotihuacan and the Mayan city states hundreds, soometimes thousands of years before the arrival of the Aztecs, if we are to believe the 250k estimate you would havee to assume that somewhere in Mexico city there is a burial site containing something in the vicinity of 50 million (consider a modern cementery is over capacity in the vicinity of 75,000 remains) human remains, and that the same would be for each and every arqueological site in Mexico... while Im sure such a site would be every archeologist's dream (or nightmare) the existance of such seems... unlikely.
It's worth noting that Cook's original estimation in his 1946 paper was 15,000 sacrifices per year,^1 but this was based upon an estimated Central Mexican population of only 2,000,000. When Cook and Borah revised their total population numbers upwards, they apparently scaled their number of sacrifices up equally, giving us the 250,000 number. I say "apparently" because neither Cook nor Borah ever published this number. If you look at the actual academic paper Harner published on the topic,^2 he notes this number comes from Borah via "personal communication."
In other words, the quarter-million number was never peer reviewed and the calculations leading to this number are unknown. What we do know is this number appears to just be an equivalent increase of sacrifices as relates to an increased estimate of overall population. Whether or not Cook and Borah took into account that sacrifices might be variable across population groups is unknown because, again, they never published their methods. Not a single other demographer or Mesoamericanist, however, has come to this same high number, or suggested that what little is known about sacrifice in the Aztec core cities can be extrapolated generally across the region, quite the opposite, actually.
What we really need to talk about, however, is Michael Harner. As an anthropologist in the 1970s, he first proposed the "ecological" hypothesis of Aztec cannibalism, which posited that mass human sacrifice was necessary for the Aztec population to meet their protein needs. Harner's proposition was immediately criticized and debunked,^3 but it was also simplistic and shocking, as so it has persisted. It is worth noting that the two links you provide are from an article Harner himself wrote for a pop-sci magazine and a newspaper article just summarizing the controversial paper. Not a single mesoamericanist subscribes to this theory, nor has it ever been in the mainstream of academic consensus. It is purely a media factoid which can be pulled out to fill column space in a sensationalist way. Notably, Harner appears never to have returned to the topic, instead pursuing a career studying neo-shamanism.
For an actual up-to-date analysis of the topic of per annum sacrifices among the Aztecs, I recommend Pennock's article on the topic.^4
^(1 Cook 1946 Human Sacrifice and Warfare as Factors in the Demography of Pre-Colonial Mexico Human Biology 18[2])
^(2 Harner 1977 The Ecological Basis of Aztec Sacrifice American Ethnologist 4[1])
^(3 Ortiz de Montellano 1978 Aztec Cannibalism: An Ecological Necessity? Science 200[4342])
^(4 Pennock 2012 Mass Murder or Religious Homicide? Rethinking Human Sacrifice and Interpersonal Violence in Aztec Society Historical Social Research 37[3])