Posted on 12/06/2010 1:07:46 PM PST by La Lydia
Sacrifice is an age-old ritual, but the inhabitants of 10th-century Peru brought sinister novelty to their rites by slaughtering children. In the Lambayeque valley on the north coast, the earliest definitive evidence of ritual child sacrifice uncovered....
"The scale and sheer complexity of the blood sacrifice of children appears to be something completely new," said Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem...
To investigate the role of ritual sacrifice in the Middle Sicán period, researchers examined 81 skeletons at the site, probing their teeth and bones to determine who they were and why they'd been killed. ... 70 per cent of the identifiable victims were anaemic Muchik children, aged 2 to 15, who'd lived out their short lives on an inferior diet of maize and squash.
... each victim had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck or chest with a metal knife, and the chest cavities pried open...Klaus's team also discovered the seeds of Nectandra plants near the skeletons. Since these have paralytic and hallucinogenic properties, Klaus suggests the drug might have been given to the victims before the ritual killing began...
Klaus speculates that the rituals may have been driven by failure of the Moche warrior sacrifices to drive away bad weather brought by El Nino. If adults didn't work, why not try kids?...
But it's impossible to determine whether the people who killed the Cerro Cerrillos children were the same people who buried them, let alone why they were sacrificed. Klaus says that the site nevertheless provides an insight into ancient socioeconomic inequality...
Anthropologist John Verano of Tulane University, doesn't buy a direct relationship between El Nino and Moche sacrifice. "My excavations of a sequence of several hundred years of Moche sacrifices at the Huaca de la Luna found no association with catastrophic weather events."
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Weird. I have that same graphic saved.
The Incas conquered and enslaved by Pizzaro didn’t practice human sacrifice, and were rather socialistic. Is there a connection? Socialism. It’ll stop you from barbecuing your kids to a pagan idol. Implement it in your country today.
Absurd hypothesis based on nothing but personal, post Enlightenment bias.
The Incas did practice human sacrifice. Look up the death rituals for Huayna Capac. More than 3,000 were sacrificed in his honor. And they have been digging up frozen Inca sacrifices from the Andes for several decades. I don’t think you can talk about Socialism in what was a pre-industrial, basically Neolithic society, but I could be wrong. And Socialist societies in Eastern Europe and Russia had horrifically high rates of abortion.
Ifwe sacrificed all the enviro-wackos, would it stop GW?
Seriously, how does crap like this get published ?
If you read all the way through, the last paragraph calls him on it for the BS that it is, and John Verano is a very highly respected architect.
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with that headline, you thought it was about a fungus among us?
Well, I am known as a fun guy.
There is no moral barrier to human sacrifice and cannibalism until the advent of what truly seems to be advanced Religion. If there is no single God-who-Said then there is no reason why not. Where there is a multiplicity of gods then some of them will require it because paganism is not about living a proper life; it is all about placating capricious gods some of whom are wholly Evil.
By the time Europeans got here sacrifice and cannibalism were already widespread. That these indigenous civilizations got taken down is precisely what needed to happen. May God grant us the wisdom to guide our Western civilization back into His light lest the world becomes the darker and far more brutal place without us.
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