Indiana Jones missed the REAL Mayan skull - used in a game of ‘squash’ where the losers would become human sacrifices
The ‘crystal skulls’ relics of ancient American civilisations have all been exposed as fakes - but a Mayan carved skull appears to be the real thing.
Not only that, experts believe the relic - buried along with its owner between 250AD and 600AD - may have been a replica of a ‘hand guard’ worn when the Mayans played a game not dissimilar to squash.
There was one crucial difference, though - the losers would sometimes become human sacrifices.
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Where child sacrifice is a business
The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.
Schoolchildren are closely watched by teachers and parents as they make their way home from school. In playgrounds and on the roadside are posters warning of the danger of abduction by witch doctors for the purpose of child sacrifice.
The ritual, which some believe brings wealth and good health, was almost unheard of in the country until about three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country’s economy.
The mutilated bodies of children have been discovered at roadsides, the victims of an apparently growing belief in the power of human sacrifice.
Shocking story via the BBC News Website
Mass Grave of Children and Llamas Found in Dune
Seen earlier this month, archaeologist Oscar Gabriel Prieto kneels by the 800-year-old skeleton of a child recently unearthed near a fishing village in Peru. The skeleton was among the bones of 42 children discovered in a shallow grave on a sand dune near the town of Huanchaquito.
Alongside the children were 76 skeletons of camelids—most likely llamas but possibly alpacas—perhaps intended to transport the victims to the afterlife, researchers say.
Prieto’s team suspects the children were killed as part of a religious ceremony by the Chimú culture. Famed for irrigation advances, the Chimú occupied the northern and central coasts of Peru from about A.D. 1100 to 1500, when the culture was conquered by its neighbors, the Inca.
The newfound mass grave is just over half a mile (a kilometer) from the ancient Chimú capital of Chan Chan.
“That’s what makes this so interesting. Up to this point, all the Chimú ritual sacrifices and ceremonies in this area were made within Chan Chan,” said Prieto, an archeology graduate student at Yale University.
“Now it’s clear that they were using the landscape” in their rituals as well. The team thinks the children and animals may have been sacrificed as part of a fertility ritual associated with the ocean.
“In the north coast of Peru, the ocean is very closely tied to agriculture,” Prieto said, “because the temperature of the water can determine whether there will be rain or not.”
(Also see “Ancient Tomb Found in Mexico Reveals Mass Child Sacrifice.”)
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