Me: Twenty Seconds to Immortality

[Archaeology Institute]

Nahua language and culture discussion <NAHUAT-L at LISTS.UMN.EDU> writes:
>Moreover, has anyone considered the ecological issues in this?  Somewhere many years ago, I heard somebody claim that the disposal of 80, 400 bodies (the number Duran gives for that famous example),
>or even 11, 520 bodies (the number Cook came up with) would have really messed up the delicate ecology of the Basin of Mexico.  I.e., what did they do with all the bodies?  Bernard Ortiz de
>Montellano suggests that only some people ate only certain parts of those bodies (the thigh apparently was big); what happened to the rest?  And, what did it do to the environment, if it really
>happened?

Last I checked, the ecology of Rawanda was little effected by the genocidal massacre of some 800,000 civilian non-combatants in a period of little more than eight weeks...and with machetes and garden
tools, no less.  Media footage of the massacre and its aftermath make clear that many of the victims were simply left where they died, or were tossed into rivers where they polluted the waters with a
crimson hue until such time that the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses washed out to sea, or were consumed by the wildlife of the region.  So, I must necessarily differ with your perspective
on the decimation of the ecology...particularly as I understand that human remains are largely biodegradable.
>
>
>I tend to agree with some of the other respondents to this, that it's good to treat our sources with a very heavy dose of suspicion and caution.  Not only because they themselves come from authors
>who presume certain realities, but also because we ourselves come from situations that presume certain realities.

Good point!  It is precisely this line of thinking that will continue to parody any and all thinking on any and all matters of the human spirit...and the carnage that generally follows.  Where does
that leave anthropology, history, ethnohistory, etc?  While I think that critical theory and post-modernist critiques have their place in the academy, I must confess that as the product of an
impoverished family from an "oppressed" minority ethnic group, such critiques generally fall short in their efforts to go beyond hegemonic discourse analysis...and into the realm of how it is that
people like my family and I were able to put food on the table.  Such discursive networks have little utility for the vast majority of the world's population, which is hungry, poor, and uneducated in
the niceties and frivolities of post-modern thinking.
>
>My question, I guess, is why are we still concerned with the numbers of sacrifice?  The sources are rich with a huge number of wonderful issues and topics; why is this still a burning question at
>least 60 years later.  By the way they burned and decapitated people, and shot people with arrows, among other things too, why are we so hung up on the heart extractions?  Is this really, really
>important for our understanding of Aztec sacrifice or, more generally, of Aztec worldviews, or does the question itself say something important about ourselves?

These too are good questions, but do suggest a degree of naivette about what you yourself bring into question about what is significant, and what is not, in the world of scholarship.  Why would
anyone care about the total number of human beings slaughtered in the Rawanda genocide...after all, it would seem that by your argument, such considerations (of genocide), have no place in the
conflict ridden tribal zone of the academy.  I would also counter by reframing your question by asking: "why are we still concerned with the numbers..." of people in Tenochtitlan, or the quantity of
debitage on an archaeological site...or the number of atoms in an atomic bomb?  Like you, I simply put these thoughts out there as food for thought...or for the Gods, as the case may be!

Best Regards,

Ruben G. Mendoza, Ph.D., Director
Institute for Archaeological Science, Technology and Visualization
Social and Behavioral Sciences
California State University Monterey Bay
100 Campus Center
Seaside, California 93955-8001

Email: archaeology_institute at csumb..edu
Voice: 831-582-3760
Fax: 831-582-3566
http://archaeology.csumb.edu
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