It was slaughter on an industrial scale, but remember, Abraham was going to sacrifice his son and that "family scale" human sacrifice was common at that time in his part of the world. In proportion to population if Abraham had sacrificed his son it probably would have been proportionally as bad as the Aztecs. Same thing for the Celts of pre and non-Roman Europe and I'm sure for most other peoples around the world. Hell, what were the Salem witch trials but human sacrifices? The Aztecs practices are horrible because of the mass of victims gathered together at one time, just as with the scale of slavery in North and South America after plantations got started accentuating those horrors. However, a slave was just as much in chains and a human sacrifice was just as dead, whether done individually or in large groups.
My family name was brought to this continent by my ancestor while a slave. He was put in chains and sent off to work on a sugar cane plantation in the Carribean following the failure of one of the last Jacobite rebellions in Scotland. Chains is chains. He certainly had more opportunities to get out of it than those brought from elsewhere, but he was bought at the slave auction just like the rest. The family legends about those years are horrendous. Ever see the movie Captain Blood with Errol Flynn? Along those lines.
I was aware that some of the roots of the Aztecs were in the Rockies, but I understood that they weren't "the Aztecs" until they banded together with other groups, conquered the central Mexico region and took over Tenochtitlan as their capital. That history, as alluded to in the original part of the article, adds to the enmity between the self styled descendants of the Aztecs and the descendants of the folks that drove them out.
To put it in more contemporary terms, the people that became the Aztecs never controlled the region that they claim as Aztlan, but they did have a home in the neighborhood. Other people did take control of the area in the time honored way, just as the Aztecs took over their domain in central Mexico when they moved there.
Have you ever been to the Acoma Pueblo about 40 miles west of Albuquerque? It is listed as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the US, something like 1500 years. We visited there one Christmas vacation. Coldest place I've ever been in my life. We took the tourist bus up onto the mesa some 500 feet above the surrounding country, which is already 7,000 feet above sea level. There's nothing between there and the North Pole and even the barb wire fences are way down below, so there's nothing to slow down the wind. When the bus got to the top of the mesa the 7 families who live there year round at the time (a few hundred live there in season) came out to sell us pottery and other souvenirs. It was about 20 below and a biting wind and this one guy came out in shorts and a T shirt. I said "fella, please, your making feel like I'm freezing just looking at you." He pointed to an out house sticking out over the edge of the mesa and said "imagine going out there at 3 in the morning, now that's cold!"
It is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, but MAN!
Thanks much. You know this subject better than me.