Aztec Tzompantlis, Moche Sacrifice, and present-day Bolivia

Who the hell knows what a lot of skulls of sacrificial victims, arranged with obsessive neatness, meant to the Aztecs?  The speculations of modern archaeologists on the subject never rise above patently obfuscatory and complacently anachronistic attempts to explain it away without really thinking about it.  Which is all very well when one is reading somebody-or-other's fictive, febrile 120 Jours de Sodome, but which

will not do when confronting the Horrific Facts of History.  

A measured defense of Modern Archaeology might say--because the anointed "gift-giver" Michel Foucault said so--that "no one can think or write outside of his own historical/cultural context."   And perhaps modern archaeologists believe that.  One wonders, of course, about the value of archaeology so circumscribed; but certain it is that, a "contextualized" historical discipline, instinct with a preening, postmodernist contempt for empirical evidence--and self-amputated of the most rudimentary faculties of logical analysis--can tell us nothing about the phenomena it claims to expostulate.   

It might have been better to've said nothing in the first place--rather than nothing of any worth or consequence--but a simple, peremptory, "Shut the fuck up and look!" is, perhaps, the only corrective that's needed.

Notice that an enlarged image of the temple (here, on the left) at the summit of the double pyramid, whose upper façade is outlined in red, shows that it is also a (probably sculpted) skull-rack (Nahuatl Tzompantli): Skull-rack above facing skull-rack below.  Whaaaaat?!

I include without comment images (below) of the human sacrifices, and remains thereof, of the Moche People.  Their recent archaeological discovery, fully and carefully documented by top-notch field- archaeologists (as opposed to blathering archaeological theorists) has been seen in scientific journals, in public television documentaries, and extensively in the National Geographic.  Their relevance in this little photo-essay is as a sort of bridge to the last couple of photographs taken recently during the last annual Bolivian celebration of the "Day of the Skulls." 

 You have to Google and read about the Day of the Skulls to believe it.  Suffice it to say that their relationship (so call it, for to them so it is) to their skulls is, for the 90% "ethnic" community of Bolivia, a nationally defining cultural meme.  As the Roman Catholic church is wont to do when dealing with popular manifestations of morbidity, it condemns the practice of skull-veneration officially--and on a local level happily participates in it, with parish priests blessing the skulls and leading processions to the cemeteries.

The peculiar Bolivian national veneration of skulls, and the celebration of festival days in their honor, are, apparently, ancient, pre-Conquest and pre-Christian customs.  No doubt, they have survived with so little change because Bolivia, more than any other country in the New World, is, and always has been, a predominantly unassimilated "Indian," rather than Spanish society--as we have learned with the election of Evo Morales and his inspired, and inspiring,

 creation of the new ethnic/socialist state of Bolivia. Still, it is rather astonishing that the ancient ethnic beliefs and thought which motivate the old ways and customs have survived along with them:  In the words of an old woman devotee, "The Soul has seven parts, the longest-lasting and most characteristic of which is the skull." When I read that, I was nearly sick to my stomach.