MEXICO CITY (AP) – New research suggests that Spanish conquistadors massacred at least a dozen women and their children in an allied Aztec city where the inhabitants sacrificed and ate a detachment of Spaniards they captured months earlier.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History published on Monday the findings of years of excavations in the city of Tecoaque, which means “the place where they ate” in the Nautical language of the Aztecs.
Residents of Tecoaque, also known as Zultepec, captured a convoy of about 15 Spaniards, 50 women and 10 children, 45 infantrymen who included Cubans of African and indigenous descent and about 350 allies of indigenous groups in 1520. All were apparently sacrificed within months.
When conqueror Hernán Cortes learned of this, he ordered Gonzalo de Sandoval to destroy the city in revenge in early 1521.
Archaeologist Enrique Martínez Vargas said the excavations suggest that the inhabitants of Tecoaque knew that a reprisal attack was coming and threw the Spaniards’ bones – some of which had been carved into trophies – and other evidence into shallow wells.
City dwellers also tried to erect some primitive defensive works along the city’s main thoroughfare, none of which worked when De Sandoval and his punitive expedition arrived.
“Some of the warriors who stayed in the city managed to escape, but women and children remained, and were the main victims,” said the institute in a statement. “We were able to demonstrate this on a 120-meter (yard) stretch of the main thoroughfare, where the skeletons of a dozen women who appeared to be ‘protecting’ the bones of ten children between the ages of five and six were found. “
Photos of the excavations show children’s bones alongside those of adult women, with some of the women’s skulls or arm bones aimed at children.
“The location of the burials suggests that these people were fleeing, were massacred and hurriedly buried,” said the institute. “Women and children who took shelter inside rooms were mutilated, as evidenced by the discovery of bones cut on the floor. The temples were burned and the statues were beheaded. “
Cruelty was on display on both sides in Tecoaque, site of one of the worst defeats in the Spanish conquest of 1519-21.
The heads of captive Spanish women were hung on skulls next to those of men. An analysis of the bones revealed that the women were pregnant and, in pre-Hispanic practice, this may have qualified them as “warriors”. Another offer of sacrifice included the body of a woman who was cut in half near the remains of a dismembered child of 3 or 4 years old.
A Spaniard was dismembered and burned to reproduce the mythical fates of the gods of the Aztec era, according to a myth known as “El Quinto Sol”, or Quinto Sol.
The convoy consisted of people sent from Cuba on a second expedition a year after Cortes’s initial disembarkation in 1519 and they were on their way to the Aztec capital with supplies and possessions from the conquerors. Cortes was forced to leave the convoy alone while trying to rescue his troops from an uprising in what is now Mexico City.
Members of the captured convoy were held prisoner in cells without doors, where they were fed for six months, experts said. Little by little, the city sacrificed and apparently ate the horses, men and women. But the pigs brought by the Spaniards to eat were apparently seen with such suspicion that they were killed whole and left without eating.
In contrast, the skeletons of the captured Europeans were shattered and had cut marks indicating that the meat was removed from the bones.
Cortes conquered the Aztec capital at the end of 1521.
Mexico is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the conquest this year with a special round of research and academic conferences.