THE 63 SKELETONS WERE ARRANGED IN THE

sealed death pit like actors on an eerie stage

set. Just outside the King’s Grave, archae-

ologists found six soldiers lined up, still

wearing helmets and “guarding” the royal

tomb. Beside them were two ox-drawn carts

with drivers, grooms, and oxen lying nearby.

Rows of men and women lined the passage

to the tomb, and courtesans with elaborate

golden headdresses sat in a circle around a

set of musical instruments. This was a “the-

atre of public cruelty,” enacted at the death

of a Sumerian ruler about 4500 years ago in

ancient Mesopotamia, according to an ini-

tial report by Leonard Woolley, the Brit-

ish archaeologist who excavated the royal

tombs of Ur in Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s.

Woolley concluded in 1934 that these

courtesans and servants had drunk some

“deadly or soporifi c drug” from cups and a

large copper cauldron he found in the pit.

Most scholars accepted his account that the

victims had gone willingly to their deaths, to

serve their ruler in the netherworld.

So, when three researchers at the Uni-

versity of Pennsylvania (Penn) Museum of

Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadel-

phia took their fi rst look recently at computed

tomography scans of two skulls from the

death pit, they got a big surprise. “Holy cow!”

said paleoanthropologist Janet Monge when

she saw unmistakable radiating fractures

from a blow to the side of a skull. This wasn’t

a case of mass suicide à la Jim Jones, but the

ritual murder, or sacrifi ce, of

63 humans.

The Penn team proposed in

a report in Antiquity last year

that the retainers “were felled

with a sharp instrument, heated, embalmed

with mercury, dressed and [only then] laid

ceremonially in rows.” The ornaments and

helmets had obscured the damage from the

mortal blows for decades.

This new look at the victims of Ur is one

of a fl urry of multidisciplinary studies that

has recently documented a macabre trail of

human sacrifi ce that leads to every corner of

the world, from the death pits of Ur and China

to burials atop the highest peaks of the Andes.

Using rigorous forensic and bioarchaeolog-

ical methods, researchers have been able to

reconstruct victims’ last days and hours, and

sometimes their identities, testing contro-

versial claims of human sacrifi ce. “This is

an exciting time for this kind of research,”

says biological anthropologist John Verano of

Tulane University in New Orleans.

Researchers are finding that although

human sacrifi ce was not frequent in most cul-

tures, it was pervasive, taking place at one

time or another in just about every ancient

civilization in which someone had the rank

and power to decide who died, Verano says.

Although human sacrifi ce was seen as bar-

baric by classical times, it persisted in Rome,

the Americas, and elsewhere until the rise

of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions

that condemned it. Across cultures, most

cases shared twin motivations: to please the

gods, and to vividly assert and display rul-

ers’ power. For early states, whose rulers were

consolidating power, ritual sacrifi ce seems

to have been one way to discourage outside

attacks and internal revolt by sowing fear.

The cross-cultural data are beginning to give

researchers an idea of “key patterns in the ori-

gins, motivation, and methods of [sacrifi ce],”

says bioarchaeologist Haagen Klaus of Utah

Valley University in Orem.

Myth or reality?It doesn’t take a scholar to guess from the

friezes of Roman temples, images on Maya

pots, or scenes in ancient Greek plays

that our ancestors might have sacrificed

one another. Historical accounts—from

Herodotus in Greece and Pliny the Elder in

Rome to Spanish priests in the Americas—

recount sacrifi ces made by

the Scythians, Etruscans,

Romans, Incas, Aztecs, and

Norse. Engraved labels on

ancient Egyptian jars sug-

gest that some early rulers took servants and

concubines with them to the next world. Art

on ceramic urns show a Maya god “sitting

down to a plate of human hearts, just like

a Maya king would eat a plate of tamales,”

says bioarchaeologist Andrew Scherer of

Brown University.

Although depictions of ritualistic decapi-

tation and dismemberment are found in the

art and literature of many societies, convinc-

ing physical evidence has been rare until

18 MAY 2012 VOL 336 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 834

Seeking to impress both gods and humans, early state societies across the globe

displayed their power by ritually killing human victims

Royal prerogative. An artist’s impression of the death scene in a royal tomb at Ur from The Illustrated London News in 1928.

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SPECIALSECTION

recently. “People didn’t really look at marks

of perimortem violence, so they didn’t see the

evidence,” says bioarchaeologist Vera Tiesler

Blos of the Autonomous University of Yuca-

tán in Mexico.

This led some researchers to challenge the

claims for human sacrifi ce in general and in

Mesoamerica in particular. “I don’t think that

what we say is human sacrifi ce is anything

other than [deaths in] war,” says archaeolo-

gist Elizabeth Graham of University College

London, who studies Maya sites in Belize.

She notes that victims are often captives taken

in war. “All societies have socially sanctioned

killing,” she says, citing the Holocaust of Ger-

many as a particularly grievous recent exam-

ple. “The poor Aztecs have been made out to

be the most brutal people in the world, but if

it’s actually warfare, they killed few people.”

Researchers agree that iconography

and texts alone can’t confi rm sacrifi ce. For

example, ethnographic accounts claim that

the Aztecs slaughtered 80,000 war captives

when dedicating the Great Pyramid of Teno-

chtitlan in 1487, but

this is widely consid-

ered an exaggeration.

However, in the past

15 years, researchers

at Aztec sites have

excavated sacrifi cial

knives and stones,

some with traces of

human blood, as well

as bones with cut

marks and signs of

heart extraction. This

has “led us to con-

clude without a doubt

that human sacrifi ce

was a basic practice

of Aztec religion,”

says Leonardo López

Luján of the Templo

Mayor Museum at

the National Institute

of Anthropology and

History in Mexico

City. At Tenochtitlan,

his team found 47

decapitated bodies

and 42 children with

slit throats.

So many new

cases of sacrifice have been documented

in the past decade that researchers classify

them informally. There are retainer burials

where slaves die with their owners; offerings

of prized children; dedicatory burials that

are a sort of bloody feng shui to bless build-

ings, such as Tenochtitlan during construc-

tion; and ritual killings of captives from war.

The difference between these deaths

and other state-sanctioned killings is that

sacrifi ce is ritualistic. Researchers add

that they aren’t targeting any particu-

lar society; indeed, a major finding

is that human sacrifi ce was found in

most emerging city-states around the

world, particularly under a new ruler or

in times of crisis. At the same time, it

was relatively rare within populations.

“Not everyone gets a sacrifi ce at their

funeral,” Scherer says. Klaus agrees:

“There’s not a lot of trauma in the popula-

tions at large. But a special subset of people

did die extremely brutal and violent deaths at

a variety of sites.”

Loyal subjectsRetainer sacrifi ce, as at Ur, was apparently

performed so that rulers could live in the

afterlife much as they did in life, and to dem-

onstrate their impor-

tance to the living.

“It’s not a sacrifi ce in

the sense of slaugh-

tering a cow or offer-

ing meat” to a god,

says Penn archaeolo-

gist Richard Zettler.

At Ur, the court atten-

dants were set up as

though they were at

a banquet with food,

drink, and music.

They were adorned in

golden wreaths stud-

ded with lapis lazuli

and carnelian.

But did those

who died really play

the roles of guards,

grooms, and courte-

sans in life? Stron-

tium isotopes in

bones and teeth show

that two retainers at

Ur were born locally

and were not foreign

captives, suggesting

that they were indeed

servants, says Penn

archaeologist Aubrey Baadsgaard.

Such extravagant retainer sacrifi ces were

rare. At Ur, the practice appears in only 16 out

of about 2000 graves unearthed in the Royal

Cemetery. But it also occurs in Egypt, at the

tomb of King Aha in Aby-

dos, in 2900 B.C.E.; and in

China in the 2nd millennium

B.C.E. when kingship had just

been established, says archaeologist

Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University

in Baltimore, Maryland. “When you estab-

lish a new kingdom, a new kind of political

organization with a ruler at the top, very often

there is this strategy of making a big show of

the power of this new social order by having

this kind of retainer sacrifi ce,” Schwartz says.

At Ur, the number of sacrifi cial victims

and wealth of the treasures declines from

about 2600 B.C.E. to 2450 B.C.E. The prac-

tice also declines and then vanishes in Egypt,

perhaps because it was too costly to bury

such wealth, both in objects and human life,

or because established kings didn’t need such

a conspicuous display of power.

The Maya also practiced a form of retainer

sacrifi ce in which some victims were chil-

dren. In 2010, Brown University archae-

ologist Stephen Houston and his colleagues

found six blood-red cache vessels beside a

king’s body in an airtight chamber of the El

Diablo pyramid in the jungle near El Zotz,

Guatemala. Interred in about 350 C.E., the

caches contained the heads, teeth, and bod-

ies of six children, aged 6 months to 5 years.

The smallest were stuffed in the bowls whole,

but the older children had been dismembered.

Feast for the gods. The Maya

offered bowls with the heads,

teeth, and bodies of children

and adults at the El Diablo pyr-

amid in Guatemala.

Death of a child. The Inca cut open this Muchik child’s chest and removed the heart about 500 years ago.

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Several had been ritually burned around the

face and chest with low heat.

This matches previously known Maya ico-

nography, showing children burning in large

bowls with their hearts cut out, Scherer says.

Such sacrifi ces “don’t

seem to have anything

to do with warfare,”

Scherer says. “The

Maya are replicating

myths, with scenes of

child sacrifice to the

maize god.”

Sacrifi cial lambs Children were vic-

tims in other cultures,

too, perhaps because

they are often seen

as the most precious

offering. The Inca,

for example, built

platforms high in

the southern Andes,

where they held

mountaintop cere-

monies called capa-

cocha, in which they

sacrificed beautiful,

unblemished children.

For example, a 15-year-old girl called

the Llullaillaco Maiden was discovered in

1999 with a 7-year-old boy and a 6-year-

old girl atop the 6739-meter-elevation

Volcán Llullaillaco in northwest Argentina

(http://scim.ag/LMaiden). The children

were buried about 500 years ago, with gold

and silver fi gurines. Two had headdresses of

white feathers; one, a silver bracelet. Their

youth and rich gifts suggest they were not

captives of war, says archaeologist Johan

Reinhard of the National Geographic Soci-

ety in Washington, D.C.

The children were apparently treated well,

consistent with ethnographic records sug-

gesting that it was an honor to be chosen for

this sacrifi ce. Stable isotopes from the Maid-

en’s hair showed that her diet changed dra-

matically about a year before death, from a

peasant’s diet to one suddenly rich in meat

and maize, an elite food; her diet shifted to

more grains a few months before her death, as

she trekked to the peak. “Children were spe-

cially selected and treated royally perhaps a

year before they were taken up to the moun-

taintop,” Verano says.

Child “sacrifi ce doesn’t mean giving up

those you don’t like,” Klaus says. “It’s giv-

ing up those that matter the most.” And the

Inca may not have thought of their children

as dying. “In this very sacred mountain

environment, they’d be seen as living with

the gods,” Reinhard says. “They would, in

essence, become deifi ed.”

And yet even Inca priests may have had

an eye to impressing other humans as well

as the gods, says bioarchaeologist Tiffi ny

Tung of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The feting of the children en route to the

peaks and the hubris of staging sacrifi ces

at such lofty heights would have inspired

awe and fear, helping the Inca assert power

over their vast empire,

Reinhard says.

Captive audience There are many instances

of reverential child sac-

rif ice, but researchers

agree that killing captives

after battle may have

been the most common

kind of human sacrifi ce.

Performed by cultures

as diverse as the Aztec,

the Wari, and the Shang

Dynasty in China, this

practice involves more

than merely disposing of

captives, those who study

it insist. It is designed to

shock and awe both ene-

mies and subjects.

For example, in the 1980s, Chinese

researchers uncovered 14 skulls in a row,

including one placed inside a bronze food

steamer, in the royal cemetery of Anyang,

the capital of the ancient Shang dynasty

in east-central China. The researchers

assumed the skull fell into the pot by

accident. Then in 1999, another skull

turned up in a steamer in a tomb in a later

Shang capital, according to archaeolo-

gist Tang Jigen of China’s Academy of

Social Sciences. This “leads us to the

inescapable conclusion that the Shang

people did indeed have the cruel custom

of steaming human heads,” he said in a

recent publication.

Anyang fi ts the profi le of cultures that

sacrifi ce captives: At about 1200 B.C.E.,

it was the center of the country’s first

expansive power. Archaeologists found

up to 15,000 sacrificial victims during

digs in the 1930s and 1950s, and are now

examining them in detail. Most are men

of military age who were decapitated,

Jigen says.

The men’s arms and legs were fre-

quently cut off in similar ways, suggest-

ing they were killed ritually rather than in

battle, and the human remains are mixed

with animal bones. Few pits contain

goods such as pottery that are included in

typical burials. Shang oracle bones provide

hints of sacrifi cial procedures: One inscrip-

tion made on a defl eshed skull mentions the

decapitation of an enemy leader.

The deaths may mark the ritual kill-

ing of war captives in order to provide food

or slaves to ancestors, says archaeologist

Roderick Campbell of New

York University, noting that

the pits often contain remains

of cattle, dogs, grain, wine,

and other material commonly

used in sacrif ices. Later

dynasties did not continue the

penchant for sacrifi ce, about

which later Chinese annals

are silent.

Halfway around the

world, the iconography of

the Moche of northern Peru

also suggests brutal sacrifi ce

of war captives, done in ways

that highlight the victor’s

power. Images show cap-

tives being paraded naked

with bloody noses before

a warrior priest and having

their throats slit. But until the

Trophy head. The Wari of Peru made a trophy of this captive foreigner’s head in a highly ritualized process.

Mountaintop maiden. This 15-year-old Inca girl was sacrifi ced atop Volcán Llullaillaco in Argentina 500 years ago.

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SPECIALSECTION

1990s, some researchers thought that such

scenes depicted Moche mythology or staged

drama, not reality.

The overwhelming bioarchaeological

evidence of hundreds of sacrif icial vic-

tims, gathered since the 1990s, contradicts

that view, Verano says. For example, the

remains of more than 100 young men in a

Moche plaza at the pyramid of Huaca de la

Luna were either left exposed on the surface

to be buried by windblown sand, or

were incorporated in the fi ll of pla-

zas during their construction around

500 C.E., Verano says. Analysis of

the remains suggests these victims

were captives brought back from bat-

tle, as they had wounds that had par-

tially healed. Patterns of cut marks

on the neck vertebrae and other

bones confi rm they were decapitated

and that their bodies were defl eshed.

This was, Verano says, a “prominent

display of military victory.”

The study of sacrifi ce is also illu-

minating the politics and social struc-

ture of ancient societies. For exam-

ple, researchers knew that after the

Moche collapsed, their descendants, the

Muchik, were ruled by another culture, the

Sicán. Both cultures practiced sacrifi ce. But

the details suggest that the Sicán governed

loosely, Klaus says, because the Muchik still

killed victims, often children, the traditional

Moche way: The children’s throats were slit,

their chests were cut open to remove hearts,

and their bodies buried with long-standing

Moche funerary rituals. “It’s a Moche tem-

plate,” not a Sicán one, Klaus says.

In other cases, researchers are using the

existence of human sacrifi ce to show that

certain cultures were more organized and

sophisticated than had been realized. For

example, a few scholars have suggested that

the Wari of central Peru were not a state-

level society. But Tung says their practices of

human sacrifi ce, found as early as 600 C.E.

to 1000 C.E. at Conchopata, suggest state-

level control and organization.

Tung and Kelly Knudson of Arizona State

University, Tempe, have analyzed stable iso-

topes in 72 Wari trophy heads, many of chil-

dren, and buried bodies. Of 29 properly bur-

ied bodies, all belonged to local people. But

almost all of the trophy heads came from

foreigners. This suggests that they were cap-

tives, according to a report last year in the

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

Captives were brought alive to Con-

chopata, beheaded, and then processed into

trophy heads in a “very systematic, very

standardized way,” Tung says. “They clearly

had a standardized tool kit for drilling holes

on the top of the head for the cord, so the

heads would be upright and facing forward

when displayed.” This matches drawings on

large ceramic urns, which show Wari war-

riors seizing prisoners and carry-

ing trophy heads. “This is impor-

tant, because it suggests you have

Wari state structures used to promote

this”—to coordinate the warriors, the

priests who made the trophy heads,

and the artists who depicted them on

urns, Tung says.

The practice suggests a state-level

society asserting its absolute author-

ity against outsiders, Tung says.

“Sacrifi ce is very orchestrated—it’s

not just death on the battlefi elds. It’s

a performance to demonstrate to your

internal community and outsiders

your absolute power.”

As more cases of sacrifi ce emerge,

some defy classifi cation. This suggests that

researchers have just begun to exhume the

myriad ways that humans killed each other

in the name of the gods and the state. “Our

ability to see sacrifi ce in the past was some-

what limited. Now we’re able to expand that

view,” Monge says. “I’d say we’re just com-

ing to realize in some measure the enormity

of the violence of humans against humans.”

–ANN GIBBONS

With reporting by Andrew Lawler.

Baptism by fi re. The Maya offered babies to their

gods, as shown in this mythological scene.

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Deep cuts. A captive Muchik sacrifi ced in

Peru suffered a series of deep cut marks on

his collar bone to extract his heart.

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The Ultimate SacrificeAnn Gibbons

DOI: 10.1126/science.336.6083.834 (6083), 834-837.336Science 

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