THE SPECTACLE OF HUMAN SACRIFICE
Inspired by a visit to Mound 72 in Cahokia State Park on April 10, 2024 approximately 924 years after the spectacle.
At the bottom where the remains of fifty-three sacrificed women, fifty-two of whom were young (most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five). The fifty-third individual was an “elderly” (thirtyish) female, […] thought of as “the matron” sparking the notion that she had been the elder wife of some man’s harem. Since there were no skeletal indications of how the women had died, it is likely that they were poisoned or strangled or that their throats had been slit. After their deaths, the women were carefully laid to rest in two rows and in two layers. Those who buried them apparently had slightly miscalculated the size of the pit tomb needed to contain fifty-three bodies, since they had to squeeze the last few in by laying them on their sides. […] The lives of those sacrificed, presumably, were extinguished nearby, and their lifeless bodies were then carried into the pit, some on stretchers. But the spectacle of human sacrifice had also happened right there, next to at least one open trench.
Timothy R. Pauketat – CAHOKIA – Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi