Engine Summer

We read this book last year in my archaeology of human sacrifice seminar, and it was an excellent reference to the scholarship which has shaped the majority of European and American thought about cannibalism. Much of the class was spent unpacking these very assumptions, coupled with a search through archaeological and art historical material for examples of the practice and ideology of human sacrifice. About half the class worked in a classical framework (I looked at the Greeks and the Scythians, and at Scythian burials; others at the 'evidence' on Crete and the Peloponesse, the Carthaginian tophet and Phoenician sacrifice, and the cult of Mt. Lykaion), and the other half worked in the New World. Those who focused on American civilizations were able to put together an alternate view of cannibalism, an intellectual history of cannibalism from the point of view of the major Pre-Columbian peoples whom we know were in contact with each other. This part of the course was juxtaposed with European depictions of cannibalism and guess what my class discovered - IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BLOOD LIBEL. Seriously, the blood libel, which in intellectual and artistic senses owes as much to the Roman reaction to the Carthaginian tophet as to the Christian tradition, and the paraphernalia of its occurrence, are the basis of the visual language of how the Europeans depicted the Pre-Columbian religious practices, especially the Aztecs.