Other times they pierced their cheeks, at others their lower lips. “They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces and they left them in this way as a sign. Stemp and colleagues deploy a passage written in 1941 by US anthropologist Alfred Tozzer to convey the gist of the practice: Just how this was done is abundantly clear from pictograms found in caves held to be sacred. Obsidian was considered a mineral created by lightning – thus it was a crucial tool for use in rituals designed to appease the gods, and to ask favours from them. Maize, the “first fruit”, was revealed to humanity when lightning struck a stone. The Maya worldview held that caves were portals to other-worldly realms, in which resided supernatural beings that clustered around a central Maize God. Some, however, were held to be sacred, or, at least, used for a sacred purpose. The blades, thin and sharp, were used for a wide variety of purposes, including the expected quotidian ones, such as skinning and scraping and cutting meat. Obsidian, the researchers explain, was an important stone to the Maya, and many thousands of complete or partial blades made from the material have been recovered from archaeological sites throughout central America. It played a major role in determining status and gender roles. As a team led by James Stemp from Keene State College in New Hampshire, US, outline in a recent paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, “auto-sacrificial bloodletting” among the Maya was intimately tied up not only with religion, but also with the relationships between “producers, consumers, practitioners, and observers”. In short, how does one tell if such a blade was used only once, by its owner, to slash or pierce his own penis? Photo-imaging using extremely high magnification is starting to illuminate a critical aspect of economic and religious practice among the ancient Maya civilisation – but the difficulties in analysing the results are considerable.įor researchers who specialise in the Maya – the meso-American society that arose around 1800 BCE and ended about 950 CE – analysing a characteristic and common type of sharp blade fashioned from obsidian carries a particular, and particularly gruesome, challenge.
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