One of the most exciting studies of cultures and civilizations is rituals and traditions. From our perspective, we often can’t understand why they did it, but to them it made perfect sense. Many of these rituals involved drugs and actions that we find strange, like throwing cows into volcanoes, and death played a major role. And not a normal, ordinary death, but a cruel death associated with mutilation.

Different Central American civilizations, such as the Mayans and Zapotecs, knew a lot about this. The remains of 14 human skulls found in Cholula show once again that the Mixtecs were not far behind.

An industry of death. An interesting aspect of many of these civilizations is death. In Egypt, there was a lucrative industry focused on maximizing profits after a significant death. In Yucatán, this had more to do with ritual than business. One example of this is the DNA study of a large number of remains discovered in a subterranean chamber around the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá in 1967.

The investigation analysed the DNA of 64 of the 106 victims and found that all were boys and at least a quarter were closely related to another person in the burial. Another analysis of 20 bodies concluded that the prisoners of war had been decapitated, mutilated and burned to the point of burning.

Offers. And these civilizations did this for a reason: offerings for better crops, rain or flooding of rivers. This is something that can be observed in 14 human skulls found in Cholula, Puebla, during an excavation in 1981. The research shows that these date back to the Early Postclassic period (c. 3000 BCE, also after the decapitation.

The study showed that all of the skulls had a waxy texture and discolouration, suggesting they had been boiled, and also showed a large number of ‘seed bones’, a taboo modification that archaeologists and historians believe were used in rituals and offerings related to agriculture.

This is how they found the skulls

Skulls. These skulls are interesting to study because they can provide a lot of information about these civilizations. Seeing the precision of the cuts made during the beheadings tells us that they knew exactly what they were doing and had a systematic program for it, and it also tells us about the individuals.

An example of this is one of the skulls found during the surveys carried out at Cholula from 1967 to 1970, because it represented three features that caught the attention of researchers: a deliberate deformation of the skull; the presence of the aforementioned ‘seed bones’, which are sutures or worm bones that can offer clues about the development and evolution of the skull, as well as the identity and ethnicity of the person in question; in addition to a pointed bone on one of the sides.

Unless, of course, we break them while exposing them, as was the case with a nearly 700-year-old skull that fell to the ground and shattered during a presentation.

Culture through ceramics. In addition to learning more about the Mixtecs and Central American culture through bone remains, researchers also rely on other objects such as ceramic materials. In the case of ceramics from Puebla, archaeologists were able to see (despite being in a less than optimal state of preservation) representations of mountains, caves, rivers, and an island. This iconography includes wavy lines, frames, and black stripes, as well as different elements associated with water and its movement.

Historians believe that the Mixtecs decorated ceramics with different themes and ‘offered’ them to those places as votive offerings. In the case of the ceramics found, the aquatic environment was probably reserved for freshwater and focused on gaining wealth from agricultural activities. They also acknowledge that this type of representation has not been widely studied in the Cholula region.

What is clear is that through the human remains, iconography, and materials that continue to emerge from time to time, we are putting more pieces into that huge puzzle of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic civilizations.

INAH Images 1, 2, Lorena Vázquez Vallin (INAH)

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