Structural Violence and Physical Death at Tlatelolco: Selecting the Chronically Malnourished for Sacrifice at a Late Postclassic Mesoamerican City (1300-1521 CE)

Human sacrifice in Mesoamerican cities was diverse and highly ritualized, and it remains incompletely understood. Knowing who was selected for ritual violence is essential for interpreting specialized mortuary deposits and furthering research on Mexica society. To understand the structure and variability of sacrificial and mortuary practices, we examine here three burial contexts from Tlatelolco, a densely populated city in the heart of the Triple Alliance. The interment contexts of Grupo Norte (n = 52) and Paso a Desnivel (n = 45) had been excavated from within the ceremonial center near the Tlatelolco Templo Mayor, and Atenantitech (n = 40) from a bordering calpulli or neighborhood. To establish which contexts are likely sacrificial deposits, we compare the age-at-death distributions, biological sex, and perimortem ritual trauma across these sites. We seek to understand if social status determined sacrificial inclusion by using metabolic and infectious disease as proxies for resource inequality. We find that the residential deposit approximates an attritional mortality distribution and that ceremonial center deposits primarily comprised non-adults, who also presented with significantly higher rates of metabolic and infectious disease than the non-adults from the residential site. Informed by previous studies and the ethnohistorical literature, we propose that impoverished individuals living on the margins of Mexica society were chosen as sacrificial victims. High prevalence of metabolic and infectious disease comorbidity indicates that these individuals endured long-term nutritional deficiency, apparently vitamin C. Further, variation in age, pathology, and perimortem treatment among ceremonial center deposits reveals the striking diversity of ritualized killings in a prominent Mexica city.