Who Did the Aztecs Sacrifice?

[L. Coyote]

1. "Scholars" ? "assumed"

The Cannibalism Paradigm: Assessing Contact Period Ethnohistorical Discourse.

In my experience it is commonplace in academic discourse, in educational media, and in popular media to assert that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced on a large scale in prehispanic America. At the same time, I have not been able to find a satisfactory eyewitness report of either activity in the numerous ethnohistorical writings from the Contact era. I employ the term "cannibalism paradigm" to describe this gap between the admissible evidence and the hearsay that informs modern beliefs about practices of consuming human flesh.

Paradigms are the biases, preconceptions and assumptions, both conscious and unconscious, that inform thought and views of reality. Kuhn (1996) described the paradigm concept and ..............

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