What is it with men who see sacrificed women and immediately begin to fantasize about their beauty and virginity?
This was the story told about the Maya “Sacred Well”, the Cenote at Chichen Itza, as popularized by an interview Alma Reed conducted with Edward Thompson, in 1923 in the New York Times, where Reed wrote
prisoners of war and virgins of flawless loveliness were sacrificed at the cenote. From early childhood the maidens had been cared for with physical perfection as a goal. Their spiritual training had martyrdom for the public good as its ideal. (Reprinted in El Palacio)
As the joke I heard went: I understand how the physical anthropologists can tell they are female; but how can they tell they were virgins?
As recently as 2003, the writer of a National Geographic feature about Maya underwater archaeology in Yucatan still felt the need to mention (and debunk) the sacrificial virgin story. The author quoted archaeologist Carmen Rojas:
Until the 1960s many people, including many archaeologists, thought virgins were the only individuals whose stories had ended in the cenotes. “We learned then that they were not all young girls…And now we know that they were not all sacrifices.”
Now add Cahokia to the list of sites where the story of mass sacrifice of young women has been called into question.
The Western Digs blog describes research by Andrew Thompson, published in the July issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, who applied a new approach to identifying the sex of bodies from Mound 72 at Cahokia.
This is a famous (the blog says, infamous, and who am I to disagree?) feature, part of “the largest display of ritual killing found anywhere north of Mexico”, a pit
lined from corner to corner with skeletons — 53 in all — neatly arranged two bodies deep, each layer separated by woven fiber mats. The victims all appeared to be women, mostly in their late teens or early 20s. Evidence suggested they were strangled, or perhaps cut at the throat, at the edge of their shared mass grave, and then interred, meters away from an ornate burial of two men thought to be clan elders, political leaders, spiritual guides, or all three.
A powerful image of systematic, gendered violence, on which much has been built. Western Digs cites nonspecific “experts” as having described the 53 women imagined buried in Mound 72 as “unblemished”, saying “some speculated that they were virgins”.
University of Illinois archaeologist Tim Pauketat, the most recent archaeologist to conduct sustained research at Cahokia, was clear about this in an interview in 2009: selection of young women of a certain age, yes, but some had clearly given birth.
Coverage of Pauketat’s then-new book on Cahokia in the popular press was a lot less careful. Writing for Salon, Andrew O’Hehir titled his article Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi, and added that the 53 women in Mound 72 were “quite possibly selected for their beauty”.
Beauty and virginity.
Neither, of course, particularly evident in skeletal remains.
In fact, the majority of the skeletons from Cahokia could not be assigned a biological sex: Thompson says that less than half of the skeletons from Mound 72 could be assigned a sex originally, and less than half of those were assessed to be certainly female. That’s less than a quarter of the buried individuals.
Thompson, a PhD candidate at Indiana University, tried a new idea: using teeth, more durable than bone, to assign sex to the skeletal remains at Cahokia.
Like all such research, his work will no doubt be open to questioning. He is quoted online as acknowledging that “There is, of course, quite a bit of overlap in tooth size between sexes, and this varies between populations”. He needed to construct a comparative framework for analysis, using other local sites with better preservation.
And even then, he still found a bias toward female victims: in the main burial pit, he identified 8 of the 53 individuals as male, very close to the 17% frequency of males in Mound 72 burials that he found overall.
Does it matter that it isn’t entirely women, if women were disproportionately victims of violence here?
I think it does. If nothing else, it should help counter the easily inflamed imagination that still, in the 21st century, leads popular writers to equate all female with all virgin (and all beautiful).
That might allow us to get beyond a kind of snuff-film moment and ask what factors led to the selection of any person for ritual burial?
For Chichen Itza, that moment has already come. Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda argues that for cultural reasons, the human victims there were more likely male than female. Eighty percent of the sample he analyzed from one cenote were, he said, children between the ages of 3 and 11.
As archaeologist Traci Ardren wrote in an overview of child sacrifice in Mesoamerica, this may reflect the “purity and strength” of children’s connection to the divine. For the Aztecs, I have argued, young children were not completely separated from the gods who gave them to human parents as gifts, until they had lived and been socialized for some time, making them appropriate messengers to the gods.
There is an opportunity now at Cahokia to revisit ideologies and ask similar questions. If a consistent 15-17% of those buried in this way were male, perhaps the selection of victims was based less on their sex than on some other quality shared by both males and females.
If, as Pauketat indicates, some of the women had given birth, and others perhaps had not, are we safe to assume that all those who were biologically female formed a single category? In other Native American societies, age mattered as much as sex, and maturation and especially being a parent was a moment that marked a transition to adulthood. What is the age appropriate for sacrifice at Cahokia?
And– might we revisit the easy application of a two sex/two gender model here, knowing that many Native American peoples recognized more than two genders, and these can be evident archaeologically?
It may not be as sexy. But it would be a whole lot more anthropological.
Holly Ober
August 7, 2013
Very nice article! I enjoyed reading it. Small typo– “And even then, he still found a bias toward female victims: in the main burial pit, he identified 8 of the 3 individuals as male.”
Rosemary Joyce
August 8, 2013
Thank you! the little joys of editing today included cutting out one digit–sacrifice?
Kate
August 8, 2013
“What is it with men who see sacrificed women and immediately begin to fantasize about their beauty and virginity?” I for one CANNOT imagine. 🙂
lilyklep
August 8, 2013
Reblogged this on Lily Does Archaeology.
Rosemary Joyce
August 9, 2013
Thanks! hope your readers enjoy it…
awax1217
August 12, 2013
I have climbed the temples of the sun. It was amazing and took all my energy for the altitude is higher than I am use to. The Aztecs to my knowledge sacrificed a lot of people who were captured in battle. They had on the top a sacrifice stone where the people had their heart ripped out. Then the hearts were arranged in a pot and if they shriveled up in the sun it would be an omen that the Gods accepted them and the crops would be good for the year.
Rosemary Joyce
August 12, 2013
Actually, Teotihuacan– where the Temple of the Sun is located– was not an Aztec (Mexica) site; it was much earlier. We do not have any evidence for this kind of sacrifice at Teotihuacan; there are burials of multiple captured warriors, near the Feathered Serpent Temple. The business about hearts shriveling in the sun is made up– completely fictional, I am afraid. The Mexica traditions say that the heart was important because of the motion it exhibited, which is linked to the word for “blood” itself.
It is a separate question how common these practices were even among the Mexica– one that is hard to reconstruct because the European sources dramatized what they saw as barbaric.
awax1217
August 12, 2013
I stand corrected Just repeated what I took as truths and found that I was taught a lot of nonsense.
Rosemary Joyce
August 12, 2013
so were we all (taught a lot of nonsense)… one of the things I hope blogs by archaeologists can do is point out what we actually do know… and the sacrifice issue is complicated…
tweeker88
August 13, 2013
Reblogged this on tweeker88's Blog.
allthoughtswork
August 13, 2013
I never got the whole virgin attraction. Who wants to have sex with a scared, inexperienced, awkward human being who doesn’t understand the exquisite possibilities of their own body–or yours?
stephaniegallon
August 13, 2013
Really fascinating post. And I’m really interested in this idea of teeth and gender. Do you think it’s at all possible? Obviously not in its current state of study, but with embellishment and research?
Rosemary Joyce
August 13, 2013
Bioarchaeology like this always starts with the known and proceeds to the unknown. It is the case that teeth, like other body parts, can be subject to sexual dimorphism. What we have to always remember is that not all human populations have high levels of sexual dimorphism; it happens that European populations historically have been sexually dimorphic, so there is a temptation to assume this as a default. The research done on Cahokia did the right thing: used local, contemporary populations where more traditional indicators had been used to assign sex and then used those studies for the values for teeth in that time and place.
Ye Pirate
August 13, 2013
Great post. Unnecessary and gratuitously offensive first line. You should be ashamed for that one.
Rosemary Joyce
August 13, 2013
Only offensive if you identify with the men who have those fantasies! And they do exist, you know. I am sure not present company, or you wouldn’t have read the post… and if you take a look at some of the others, you will see that humor is part of the mix.
Ye Pirate
August 13, 2013
Apologies! I had just read a ‘militant’ post before that one and thought ‘oh no’…. really it’s an odd fantasy! But I’m sure you’re right…
Colossal Madness
August 13, 2013
Reblogged this on Where We Can Run Naked and Free For None To See.
mrtso1989
August 13, 2013
What is the reality, as revealed by archeological researches, may not have much to do with the popular conception that the women must have been virgins and beautiful.
I believe it has more to do with the religions and myths. Ostensibly, beautiful virgins were sacrificed to appease the wrath of gods. Looking deeper, however, it may represent the need to readjust the heavenly disharmony – gods were depicted as males while virgins were sent to have union with those male gods and to achieve the natural harmony.
I think the symbolic meaning has more to do with the (mis)conception. I have, by the way, written something on it, you may wish to take it a look: The Modern Relevance of Myths http://1989nineteeneightynine.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/the-modern-relevance-of-myths/
Rosemary Joyce
August 13, 2013
Thanks for engaging. As an anthropologist, my automatic reaction is to say “whose myths? where and when?” I agree that myths are important, but they are not universal sources that tell one single story.
Among the Maya of Central America, we have zero evidence for the kind of mythic theme you are talking about. Divinities were male, female, and sometimes male-and-female at once, or in series. Physical beauty does seem to have been important for ritual participants among the peoples of Mexico and Central America– for the Mexica (Aztec) we have texts written after the Spanish invasion, in the Nahuatl language, that describe god-impersonators, selected for (among other things) physical perfection. Such god-impersonators would live for a year as an earthly representation of the god, and then were sacrificed. The majority were male.
The kind of harmonic balance of male and female you refer to is a strong element in cosmology (concepts of the nature of the universe) in east Asia. But it differs from the way that Maya, Mexica, and other native American cosmologies conceive of sex difference. That (I have argued at length elsewhere) starts with each human and divine person having the potential for maleness or femaleness. Humans are shaped from infancy to emphasize one part of that potential, although in ritual practice, they may enact or invoke more inclusive potential (something also seen in at least some ritualists in Indonesia, so this is not just an aspect of the Americas). Harmony under this kind of cosmology isn’t uniting opposites: it is doing your part of the cosmos as perfectly as possible.
Cahokia developed long before any written documents we have recording mythology. But archaeologist Tim Pauketat has drawn on the recorded mythology of the likely descendants of the people of Cahokia to explore possible meanings of these massive deposits of human beings. His ideas are very interesting, as he suggests that what happened was a dramatic performance of myth as a public ceremony that would have created a lasting memory in the people who witnessed it, and was then recounted to their successors. The sacrifice of human lives was part of creating that lasting impression. The specific mythologies involved include male and female supernatural beings, but not the kind of balancing of harmony through sexuality that you refer to.
So yes– mythology can help us understand things like this– but it needs to be local, specific, and grounded.
mrtso1989
August 13, 2013
Thanks! That’s very informative.
Elizabeth Perrill
August 13, 2013
Thank you so much for your post. I’m using this blog post as part of an introductory art history course this year (at UNC Greensboro). I want students to learn to identify authorship and to evaluate online resources, so the Cahokia debates are providing a wonderful example.
Rosemary Joyce
August 13, 2013
Very pleased to contribute to another instructor trying to help students negotiate the brave new world of accessible information… your students are very lucky.
lucilledeville
August 14, 2013
That was very informative, and I have always wondered about the virgin thing. It’s like what they check them? Another thing how do they know rather some of them were sacrificed or not? This brings up some interesting points, and what is it with men a virgins?
Rosemary Joyce
August 14, 2013
You can determine if a female has had children. That would mean in some cases, you can identify non-virgins. But that’s it.
Even more interesting to me is that when you read the original texts describing who was selected for sacrifice in Mexico, you find that they do not comment on the sexual history of the people. Their perfection (physical– lack of injuries, beauty, etc), yes. But not any comment on “virginity”. It is in fact arguable that they didn’t value “virginity”, didn’t treat it as an identity someone could have. There are descriptions of ritual specialists (male and female) having to be celibate. But that means, not engaging in sex– it doesn’t mean, never having had sex. For the Mexica, the best discussions of these issues have been raised by trying to understand the social position of certain women called ahuiana, a word that the Spanish identified as “prostitutes”– but that scholars of the Nahuatl language suggest literally means “bringer of joy”, and cannot be equated with the Spanish concept.
As for how archaeologists know if a skeleton is that of a sacrificed person– this should be questioned, whenever it is suggested, on two levels. First, “sacrifice” is a word in English, bringing along a lot of baggage from Judeo-Christian religion. Did the people involved have a concept that is even similar? You have to explore that. In Mexica (Aztec) culture, there are words we can trace that identify people who were eventually killed in a ritual fashion as the “double” of a deity; or as linked to the earth.
But what we can say, even if we haven’t done this work of understanding the specific meanings in a culture, is identify ritual killing through a number of approaches: multiple burials, unless there is evidence of disease, raise the possibility of deliberate killing. Disposal in an unusual place or manner can suggest the practice of religious ritual. Violent death may be identified by the traces it leaves on the body. If you can rule out individual violence directed at a person randomly, or disease in group deaths, then you can start to ask under what circumstances people suffered violent, stylized death. Which could still be execution, not ritual killing– but then you look at the treatment of the body: carefully laid out in a display of the products of formalized violence as at Cahokia? probably not execution– probably sacrifice.
realLundz™
August 14, 2013
Reblogged this on theyouth | POST.
Rosemary Joyce
August 14, 2013
Thanks– hope your readers enjoy it.
Rohan 7 Things
August 14, 2013
I guess it’s just another case of anthropologists interpreting the past through today’s cultural beliefs and perceptions. I sometimes wonder if the science of anthropology is inherently flawed because of this. But I suppose the same could be said for any study; we can’t but filter what we see through our preferences and opinions.
Just because the Christian world reveres female virginity with a kind of sanctity (and thereby fetishizes it), it doesn’t mean that all ancient cultures did as well. In fact according to works like Sex at Dawn, virginity, along with monogamy and exclusive heterosexuality, were never given a thought by many cultures both ancient and not so ancient.
Very good, thought provoking post! Definitely makes us question the sacrificial virgin assumption!
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Rohan.
Rosemary Joyce
August 14, 2013
Funny, because it isn’t the anthropologists making this mistake– it is the journalists. It is anthropologists trying to actually figure out the sex and age and social status of the people in these places, and it is anthropologists who actually read the sixteenth century texts critically to understand who the Mexica and the Maya selected for ritual killing.
Anthropologists have been among the leading scholars to contest universalization of ideas like monogamy as well… and even the universality of marriage between people of different sexes.
Rohan 7 Things
August 14, 2013
Good points! It’s very much in the reporting then, and the mainstream representation of the data. I guess it sells better/gets more clicks!
Rohan.
missfrancesjane
August 14, 2013
Very interesting read! I’ve always wondered how people have claimed that women were selected for beauty or virginity from bones. I wonder if the interpretation that sacrificed women were virgins comes from the tendency of modern societies to idealise and idolise virginity. Either way, the idea that sacrificed women were virgins seems to be such a widely accepted “fact” and it’s interesting to me, as a historian, that things like that can get so deeply embedded even when its not true.
I’m actually fascinated by the idea that they can tell women who had given birth. How is that?
Rosemary Joyce
August 14, 2013
I agree, the modern interpretation stems from a kind of objectification of virginity as a desirable characteristic, which in the US could easily be linked to the Victorian cult of true womanhood.
Human osteology (the study of the skeleton) is based on comparing unknown bones to facts established from a known comparative population. It is probabilistic in general; sex assignment, for example, is normally into multiple categories, from very likely male, possibly male, and uncertain to possibly female and very likely female; and sex determination can only be done reliably on adult skeletons. Outside of the discipline, these results are usually reported as if there were two clear biological sexes.
The same is true of determining if a person gave birth: there are models, but the results are reported as if they were certain, when actually, childbirth can fail to leave some of these marks, and other things can leave similar marks. In 2012 Douglas Ubelaker and Jade de la Paz published a review of how childbirth was identified from skeletal remains in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Basically, analysis focuses on variation in the component bones that make up the pelvis, since the pelvis is subjected to strains during childbirth. Not wanting to get too technical here: there are points of connection of ligaments (the preauricular sulcus), widening of something called the symphysis pubis, and physical pitting of the bone, all have been used.
I was trying to find an (ungated) online source, and what I did find was generally not good: PBS History Detectives site says to look for “soft marks on the cartilage which are left by childbirth as the bones soften to allow easier birth” which is kind of an odd synthesis of different things. The best description, which I would not have understood except that I already know the technical literature, is on a site called Forensic Science Central:
isgodsreal
August 15, 2013
Reblogged this on isgodsreal.
Rosemary Joyce
August 15, 2013
Thanks!
isgodsreal
August 15, 2013
Welcome
kartschedeen
August 15, 2013
Reblogged this on Hear Me Roar.
Rosemary Joyce
August 15, 2013
Thanks!
forstegrupp
August 15, 2013
A most interesting note questioning our modern assumptions about past cultures and their activities. Your post reminds me of a book by Margaret Atwood called the “Penelopiad” in which she retells the story of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus from the point of view of Penelope.
Just curious….when you were at Harvard did you work with Margaret Alexiou in the Classic Department?
Rosemary Joyce
August 15, 2013
I know Atwood’s work well– it is a great way to change your vision.
At Harvard I was in anthropology, the Classical archaeologist was Emily Vermeule, and there was an archaeology community that met from time to time. Not about gender– there, I credit Irene Winter then in Art History and a loose network of colleagues, many elsewhere, but including Julia Hendon at Hsrvard’s Tozzer Library.
forstegrupp
August 19, 2013
I had forgotten about Emily Vermeule and her work in archaeology. After reading your blog entry, I was reminded of various discussion of ritual and how scholars try to reconstruct the performance of ancient ritual through artifact and poetry as well as modern comparative anthropology.
Gry Ranfelt
August 22, 2013
Interesting post. It definitely is more romantic to think of beautiful virgins but scientists need to be objective.
Evans Gathaku
July 8, 2016
Nice and informative article.