Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2306733" data-attributes="member: 7240">I agree with the writer that high population density pressure were the major causes of the escalation of human sacrifice under the Mexica but beyond that initial premise, I have little time for the argument. Yes, increases in human sacrifice were a response to ecological decline. But this was because ecological problems were a manifestation of the hunger of the Earth Monster. If there were environmental problems, the Earth Monster was not receiving a sufficient number of sacrifice victims. But the idea that human sacrifice, even at peak scale, played any role in the nutritive regime of anyone other than the elite of the priest class is really very dubious.Mexica civilization was successful without domestic animals or significant hunting because people in the Mexico Valley and Yucatan learned very early how to make complete proteins by combining corn with the right things such as wood ash. But the domestication of the avocado is really the thing by which the civilization rose and fell -- while, in Mediterranean agriculture, olives had to be pressed on a large scale to produce the level of fat necessary to sustain a person on an essentially vegetarian diet, avocadoes, completely unrefined, did the job vastly vastly better.The reason the scale of human sacrifice increased so dramatically under Mexica hegemony was essentially the same as the reason tournaments got out of hand in High Medieval Europe but on a much larger scale. There were far more states in the Mexico Valley, with a much greater combined population in a smaller area than there were in Western Europe in the 13th century. Furthermore, Mexica hegemony effectively shut down war far more profoundly than the peace of God. Essentially, the Mexico Valley was a dense, acrimonious, heavily militarized society with no outlet for aggression -- the states outside the Valley weren't worth attacking and the states within the Valley were all under the domination/protection of the Aztec Confederacy. The increase in sacrifice victims was in direct proportion to the increased scale of the Flowery War (the ritualized religious inter-state war in which warriors were captured as sacrifice victims but never killed). The 15th century was not a period when new sources of sacrifice victims were sought out; what took place was that the already existing sources ie. the Flowery War and the ball games produced new sacrifice victims on a hitherto-unknown scale. This was a period of adaptation where a highly militarized society turned its military infrastructure into religious infrastructure with very strange results. Environmental decline, no doubt, increased the number of volunteers for the ball games and the Flowery War but its impact was on the supply side of sacrifice, not the demand side.</blockquote>

Verification