The Aztecs: Burial Practices

I don't know if you've heard about this, but recently, archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute for Anthropology and History unearthed about 60 500-year-old graves in Mexico along a subway line that's under construction. That's pretty cool. They also found older pots, decorative itens, burial jars, etc. These findings will allow historians and archaeologists to study the burial practices of the people that controlled so much of Mesoamerica (until the Spanish got there). In honour of this discovery, let's talk Aztec mortuary practices.

The Aztecs left archaeologists and historians with a plethora of source material to interpret. The culture actively depicted daily rituals of daily life - from symbolic depictions to hieroglyphic writing. Numerous codexes, which are image-based artifacts left behind by the Aztecs, depict death and mortuary procedures of different types. Thus, the existence of "the death cult" that is characteristically attributed to Aztec culture. While a few historians choose to dispute this idea of death as a religious cult, many agree that a veneration of death was deeply embedded in Aztec culture and tradition through carefully choreographed rites and rituals.

Enjoy images of the following codexes and relish the fact that in Aztec culture, it's not your behaviour during life that impacted where your soul went, but the way you died and why you died that would direct your afterlife. So that's something.

Death of a Lord:



Death of a Merchant:



Ritual of Tititl:

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For more information, codexes, and an explanation of what is going on in these funky ass codexes above, check out this article by David Iguaz from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Signing off!

Hello, I am an introductory post.

About a year ago, I found myself in a cafe with several friends (and more importantly delicious cinnamon French toast). I explained some thing or other about papal resignation in my everyday vernacular, which is less than academic and usually includes "yo" and "dude" more often than sentences should. Amused, a friend told me to start a YouTube channel called "The Bitches of History". Not willing to sabotage any future as a serious adult, I never followed up on it.

Graduation came and went and I realized I no longer have an outlet for all the history knowledge and tidbits that live inside my head so this blog is a way for me to share what I know, what I learn, what I think, and what I stumble across on the internet when work gets a little slow.