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Notes -
Large-scale human sacrifice requires a certain population density and organizational sophistication that with a few exceptions, such as the Mississippian culture centered at Cahokia, did not exist north of the Rio Grande. There were certainly individual sacrifices as part of religious rituals in many tribes similar to those in Celtic and Norse Pagan societies in pre-Christian Europe, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind when describing any of those cultures the way it is for Mesoamericans that lined up thousands of war captives to cut their hearts out and build racks of their skulls.
As far as treatment of captives goes, torture, rape, and being sold into slavery were par for the course in the pre-modern world, so in my book Enlightenment-era Europeans deserve recognition for being more civilized than their contemporaries, while everyone else gets a "that's just how things were back then" pass. There's also the fact that British colonists only started encroaching on Indian territory in force after an apocalyptic series of pandemics had swept through and caused many of them to regress to a more barbaric state than they were at prior to European contact. This is most clear where we can read the accounts of sixteenth century European explorers who describe seeing densely populated farming villages with impressive fortifications and richly adorned chieftains in the same locations that eighteenth century explorers observed only a few isolated savages in loincloths hunting deer in the woods. In that situation there are fewer guardrails against individual acts of sadism or depravity.
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