New research suggests that Spanish conquistadores slaughtered at least a dozen women and their children in an Aztec allied city where residents sacrificed and ate a section of Spaniards they had captured months before.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History on Monday published findings from years of excavation work in the city of Tecoaque, meaning ‘the place where they ate it’ in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs.
Residents of Tecoaque, also known as Zultepec, captured a convoy of about 15 male Spaniards, 50 women and 10 children, 45 foot soldiers, including Cubans of African and Indigenous descent, and about 350 allies from indigenous groups in 1520. All are apparently sacrificed. over the course of months.
When he heard about it, the conqueror Hernán Cortés ordered Gonzalo de Sandoval to destroy the town in early 1521.
Archaeologist Enrique Martínez Vargas said excavations indicated that Tecoaque residents knew a retaliatory attack was coming and threw the bones of the Spaniards – some of whom were carved into trophies – and other evidence into shallow wells.
The inhabitants of the city also tried to erect some primitive defenses along the main road of the city. None of them work when De Sandoval and his punitive expedition enter.
“Some of the warriors who stayed in the city managed to escape, but women and children remained, and they were the biggest victims,” the institute said in a statement. “We are able to demonstrate over a 120-meter stretch of highway, where skeletons of a dozen women were found that apparently ‘protected’ the legs of ten children between the ages of five and six.”
In the photos of the excavations, children’s bones are seen, in addition to those of the adult females, with some female skulls or arm bones aimed at the young people.
“The location of the funerals indicates that these people fled, that they were hastily slaughtered,” the institute said. ‘Women and children hiding inside rooms were mutilated, as evidenced by the discovery of severed legs on the floors. The temples were burned and the statues beheaded. ”
Cruelty was seen on both sides in Tecoaque, the place where one of the worst defeats in the Spanish conquest of 1519-21 took place.
The heads of the captured Spanish women were strung on skull racks along with those of men. An analysis of the bones revealed that the women were pregnant and that they could qualify as ‘warriors’ in a pre-Spanish practice. Another sacrificial offering was the body of one woman cut in half near the remains of a broken child of three or four.
One Spanish male was decomposed and burned to replicate the mythical fates of the gods from the Aztec times, according to one myth known as ‘El Quinto Sol’, or the fifth sun.
The convoy consists of people who were sent from Cuba in a second expedition a year after Cortés’ first landing in 1519, and they were on their way to the capital of the Aztecs with supplies and possessions from the conquerors. Cortés was forced to leave the convoy alone while trying to save his troops from an uprising in present-day Mexico City.
Members of the captured convoy were detained in doomed cells, where they were held for more than six months, experts said. Little by little, the city sacrificed and ate the horses, men and women. But pigs that the Spaniards brought for food were apparently considered with such a suspicion that they were killed entirely and not eaten.
In contrast, the skeletons of the captured Europeans were torn apart and wore cut marks indicating that the meat had been removed from the bones.
Cortes later conquered the Aztec capital later in 1521.
Mexico is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the conquest this year with a special round of research and scientific conferences.