hm, dju read those articles, Archie? The first one's unavailable, as anything from JSTOR will be.

Second one is interesting, it indicates slaves were sacrificed in order to instill fear and help suppress the masses.

I am more interested in how they are drawing these conclusions. I suppose I should "look it up," as we librarians are wont to say.

Interesting
 

I have read some of Diaz's writings and they are fascinating. I think that his accounts are accurate from his biased point of view. He openly challenges Cortes' account of the events of the conquest and states that his account is the only accurate one. His words should be viewed as accurate but with the understanding that he is biased (he writes from the view of a common soldier).

More interesting to me are the Nahua and Mexica accounts (See Florentine Codex). Specificaly interesting to me is the Nahua viewpoint of the purpose of war. (Not for conquest but to gather worthy warrior / sacrifices to their gods).

The second source actually looked at Emic and Etic sources to explain the conclusions Babs. I'm going to look at the Florentine Codex now that it's been mentioned.

I'd read the second source before I posted.

It does explain how it draws conclusions regarding the purpose of sacrifice. When I said I was curious how "they" were drawing conclusions, I had intended to convey that I'm curious about how others are figuring out the frequency and nature (cruelty) of human sacrifice, aspects which you alluded to in your earlier post. The second source, unless I missed something, didn't address that.

Since I'm mostly aware of emic, not etic sources, I can't opine how frequent these events were, but if Aztecs conducted war to obtain more sacrifices, one might suppose the frequencey were regular if not often.

Oh yeah, I read snippets of some of that when I was at BYU, fascinating stuff. This is the bit about where they killed the princess, skinned her and then one of the priests showed up dressed in her skin right?

Well they had flower wars with some of the surrounding peoples. They were arranged wars, scheduled, and the purpose was to acquire live prisoners to use for sacrifices.

Arch, I thought that was a novel you're reading?

I am reading a novel, but my natural curiosity has me reading supporting archaeology and some linguistics concerning the Nahautl language. It's a fascinating language complete with pictographs and all. The pluraliization is a bit weird.

I just want to verify the research of the novelist to determine the legitimacy and authenticity of the work.