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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   29629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Human sacrifice was mostly just a Mesoamerican thing, and usually just the big regional power players, not the small tribes living under their boot heel. The tribes living in what is now the United States were pretty peaceful internally, but yes, eye-wateringly intense torture of POWs and the rape of women was a common part of inter-tribal warfare. Of course we are talking about over two hundred different tribes, and quite a few of them were genuinely very peaceful to both other tribes and white settlers. Others were very warlike.

I don't have the source handy but I definitely read a book which described human sacrifice on the Mississippi. Apparently when a chief of a certain tribe died all the babies under a year old were buried with him, as well as a lot of other people.

EDIT: Found it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692870660

Fascinating book and I've had several great conversations with the author.

Human sacrifice was mostly just a Mesoamerican thing, and usually just the big regional power players, not the small tribes living under their boot heel.

AIUI, the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest would sometimes sacrifice slaves during a potlatch, as well as other ceremonial human sacrifices. See also here (pdf):

Similar to potlatches in neighboring coastal societies, the Tlingit potlatch involved several types of gifts, some of them reserved for the aristocracy (cf. Goldman 1975:136-137). Along the entire Northwest Coast, slaves and copper sheets ("coppers," Tlingit *tinna9) were the most valuable, their symbolism similar but not identical to that of other ritual prestations. Both slaves and coppers were brought from the “outside,” the former through warfare with the neighbors to the south, the latter through trade with the interior Athabascans and later with Europeans (Keithahn 1963b). Neither slaves nor coppers were used for utilitarian purposes, since the former were purchased just before the potlatch and did not do any work (Oberg 1973:116) and the latter were reserved exclusively for ceremonial exchanges. Slaves, like other gifts, were placed in physical contact with the hosts’ crests: they were killed with a special club depicting their master’s crest, or held a rope tied to a headdress owned by their master (Olson 1967:63). The freeing of slaves, which increased in the postcontact period due to European pressure, was equivalent to killing them, since both acts made them socially dead (freed slaves had to leave their owner’s community; cf. Goldman 1975:54). The slaves sacrificed in the potlatch became the servants of the hosts’ matrilineal ancestors, while those given away became the guests’ property. The spirits of the latter most likely became the property of the dead as well.

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