The Mayans version of Planned Homicide... Human Sacrifices... 200,000 a day?
You needed a few good tzompantli, 'Skull Racks', for those really big celebration days.
What was the point of the skull rack?
"Skull rack or tzompantli in Nahuatl - the language spoken by the Aztecs. The purpose of this structure was to display the heads of sacrificed human victims. Sometimes this structure was made of stone with carved human skulls. Skull racks were usually placed near temples or ball-courts. Those displaying real skulls comprised a wooden framework supporting skulls skewered on horizontal poles run through holes drilled through the temples. Tzompantlis were described by Spanish conquistadors and missionary friars in the Sixteenth Century."
"Skull racks took a variety of forms and seem to have served several functions: altars and venues for ritual; the heads of sacrificial victims were displayed to commemorate sacrifices in honour of a god. The Aztecs used skull racks to display prowess in war; in obtaining captives to be offered up to their gods. They also used them to terrorize subjugated populations. Likewise, they were used as symbols of defeat, capture and humiliation. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the ancient Mexicans had never seen horses, so they placed horse heads on skull racks as offerings to their gods."
"The earliest known skull was excavated in Oaxaca, dating from approximately AD 600-900. Several other cultures in Mesoamerica produced skull racks: the Toltecs, Maya and the Aztecs as well as one example from West Mexico from approx. AD 900-1519. Several skull racks are known in Aztec sites, including real and sculpted skull racks. At the Great Temple of the Aztecs (their most important temple) archaeologists found a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls. They had a layer of stucco and were originally painted in red."
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital
"The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.
Death, however, was just the start of the victim's role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.
Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor—a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.
"...Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
"Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor...."