Tower Made of Human Skulls Discovered in Mexico

[FamTimes reporter Jennylyn Gianan] More than 650 skulls and thousands of bone fragments have been discovered beneath the Templo Mayor, one of the principal temples of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Aztec capital in Mexico.

The discovery has raised new questions about the origins of human-sacrifice rituals practiced in the ancient Aztec Empire.

The tower of skulls is believed to have formed part of the “Huey Tzompantli,” built to instill fear in the Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés should they capture the city.

Measuring about 6 meters in diameter, the skull tower stands in one corner of a temple dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun, war, and human sacrifice.

However, the newly discovered skull tower, unprecedented in its scale, was not built solely from the skulls of male warriors from other tribes defeated by the Aztec Empire. Skulls belonging to women and children were also found in the tower.

Rodrigo Bolaños, one of the biological anthropologists who examined the skull tower, said, “At first, we thought there would only be skulls of young men who had been warriors. The women and children whose skulls we found were not people captured on the battlefield.”

Raúl Barrera, one of the archaeologists working at the excavation site beside the location of the vast main temple, said archaeologists believe the skull tower must be the enormous structure that Andrés de Tapia testified he had witnessed during the conquest of Mexico.

Andrés de Tapia was a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortés during the conquest in 1521. De Tapia later testified that he had seen hundreds of thousands of skulls at the structure that became known as the “Huey Tzompantli.”

Such blood-soaked rituals involving human sacrifice were common in the past in the Aztec Empire and among the peoples living in Central America.

Jennylyn Gianan fam1@pcss.co.kr