Corporate media and elite institutions from The New York Times and CBS to National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine are celebrating a recently published study in the scientific journal Nature cataloging the genetic analysis of a subterranean mass burial site in the ceremonial center of Chichén Itzá, Mexico, notorious for human sacrifice during the Mayan civilization. Yet rather than trying to deny or downplay the existence of human sacrifice among indigenous American peoples, our multiculturalist institutions are actually charting a bolder route: recasting this behavior as justified and even civilized.
As incredible as such a rhetorical tack may be, it’s made even more incoherent by the fact that those willing to defend such brutal societies are the same ones who offer knee-jerk condemnations of Western sins as unequivocally evil, regardless of culture or context.
Elites Say We Shouldn’t Judge the Perpetrators of Child Sacrifice
According to the new research, all identified buried victims in Chichén Itzá were male, and several of them were closely related, including two pairs of twins. These findings track with the prominent role of twins — often representing deities and heroes — in both Mayan and broader Mesoamerican mythology. Rodrigo Barquera, a lead author of the new paper, called the research “a breakthrough,” as the biological kinship and the similar age of the victims suggest an intentional ritual practice, possibly associated with a sacred Mayan text, the “Popol Vuh,” which describes the sacrifice of a pair of twins after they lost a ballgame.
Barquera acknowledged in a
