Human Sacrifice and Political Power in the Aztec Empire: Ritual, Authority, and State Control at the Heart of Mesoamerican Civilization

Few practices in human history have been as misrepresented as Aztec ritual sacrifice. Stripped of context by conquest-era Spanish chroniclers and sensationalized by centuries of Western retelling, the rite has obscured far more than it has revealed. This book restores what that distortion removed: a coherent political and religious system in which sacrifice was not spectacle, but statecraft.

Drawing on Nahuatl codices, excavation records from the Templo Mayor, and recent forensic archaeology...