The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests from what is now Mexico City selected a few each day at dawn, held them down on a sacrificial slab, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods.
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"It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected," Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.
"You can only imagine what it was like for the last ones, who were left six months before being chosen, their anguish."
The priests and town elders, who performed the rituals on the steps of temples cut off by a perimeter wall, sometimes ate their victims' raw and bloody hearts or cooked flesh from their arms and legs once it dropped off the boiling bones.
Knife cuts and even teeth marks on the bones show which ones had meat stripped off to be eaten, Martinez said.
Some pregnant women in the group had their unborn babies stabbed inside their bellies as part of the ritual.
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On hearing of the months-long massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque -- meaning "where people were eaten" in the indigenous Nahuatl language -- and sent an army to wipe out its people.
When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims' possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewelry for the archeologists.
The team, which began work here in 1990, also found remains of domestic animals brought from Spain, like goats and pigs.
"They hid all the evidence," said Martinez. "Thanks to that act, we have been allowed to discover a chapter we were unaware of in the conquest of Mexico."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/23/aztecs.cannibals.reut/index.html
Такая вот история про благодарного Мартинеса и язык Нахуятл.