Saturday, March 9, 2019

So much for all that romanticization of ancient cultures - Peru finds evidence of huge child massacres - By Monica Showalter


The Left obsessively romanticizes ancient cultures — purer, closer to Mother Earth, matriarchal, greener, more progressive.  And these cultures' contacts with the West (and Christianity in particular) — were Always Bad.  But the truth has gotten out yet again about how harsh and inhuman these cultures were in a news story about unprecedented child sacrifice discovered in an ancient empire in Peru, the Chimú civilization.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Anthropologists have found evidence of a mass ritual killing that involved the deaths of more than 140 children, three adults, and at least 200 young llamas on the northern coast of Peru.
The archaeological site, known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, represents one of the largest known cases of mass child sacrifice ever seen in the Americas.
Gabriel Prieto, a professor of archaeology from the National University of Trujillo who started excavating Huanchaquito-Las Llamas in 2011, said the discovery shocked him and his colleagues.
"In Peru we are familiar with human bones, but in this particular case there were so many skeletons and they were all children," he said.  "It was astonishing."
The sacrificial victims ranged in age from 6 to 14, and appear to have been killed in a well-planned and choreographed event on a single, horrific day.  Their mummified bones were found carefully arranged with their heads facing the ocean and their feet facing the mountains.  Many of their remains were found with the bones of one or two young llamas lying on top of them.
The children, both boys and girls, all appear to have been killed in the same way — with a single horizontal slice across the sternum.
As if all this wasn't gruesome enough, researchers say that many of the children's rib cages appear to have been pried apart.  This suggests that their hearts were removed shortly after they died.
The Times and other news outlets report that the discoveries are significant because they represent the largest child massacres ever found in the Americas.  The Times notes that it wasn't the only one — another huge massacre Chimú site was found nearby, meaning that it was probably a regular event.  How a civilization could survive by killing so many of its exquisite fresh-faced children, which we look at as the image of God in our Judeo-Christian culture, is, well, as the lefties say, unsustainable.  No wonder the Inca eventually conquered the Chimú.  And the Inca weren't pure, either.  They also engaged in human sacrifice — and they were toppled easily by the Spanish.
More significantly, many of the native peoples did embrace Christianity as it was offered, very quickly — not just in Peru, but in that other redoubt of human sacrifice, Aztec Mexico, because among other things, there was no human sacrifice.  The Spanish soldiers who led the way for it were tough bastards, but the friars who accompanied them were kind, and numerous instances through history signaled that they often served as the native peoples' defenders.  Franciscan friar Junípero Serra, who is often reviled on the Left as the founder of California, taught the Indians skills in the missions he founded because he wanted to make sure the Spanish didn't slaughter them.  Needless to say, he had no affection for the Aztec alternative, which is particularly romanticized now on the Left.
Most of the lefties who now dress up as Aztecs aren't descended in the least from the Aztecs.  Many are descendants of the Tarasco of Michoacán, Mexico, the somewhat more peaceable craftsman empire that was the sworn enemy of the Aztecs.  When the Aztec empire sought help from the Tarasco to defend their empire against the Spanish, the Tarasco leaders slaughtered the Aztec messengers as their reply.  None of these ancient cultures was pure.  
And forget about that human sacrifice — cannibalism was practiced at one time by the Native Americans in the U.S. southwest as well.  The Anasazi, who had a civilization in what is now Colorado, and around the four corners area, terrorized their fellow tribes by literally eating them and excreting their remains on their kitchen tables.  There's evidence that it wasn't just the Anasazi who engaged in this abhorrent practice.
There are also the Left's other favorite dreamscape from ancient cultures: the so-called matriarchal societies.  This research indicates that the phenomenon was not quite what lefties think it was.
This is not to say there is nothing to respect or admire in ancient cultures — I have been to Peru myself, and I collect the beautiful Chimú black clay pottery.  If you go to Peru's museums in Lima, or Mexico City's famed Museum of Anthropology, you will marvel at the beautiful things these ancient people created — textiles, metal work, pottery, and other kinds of art, as well as respect the fact that they could found a civilization against harsh natural elements.  But the ugly truths aren't and shouldn't be papered over.
The mass murder practiced by the Chimú pretty well kills the leftist romance about ancient peoples being culturally superior by the standards we insist on living by.  No, not all cultures are equal.  Romanticizing some past ones as somehow better, superior, more wonderful in all ways than the way we live now is gone there on that bone heap found in northern Peru.