Archaeologists digging in Mexico City recently unearthed a massive “tower of skulls,” dating back to the era of the Aztecs, per the Washington Post.
As the Post noted in a 1983 article, Andre’s de Ta’pia, a soldier in Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’ army in 1521, when the Aztec empire fell, chronicled that the warring party had come across a tower of heads 136,000 strong.
Nearly 500 years later, the heads may have been discovered at a site whose diameter is 20 feet in length (diggers haven’t even reached the bottom yet), and near a chapel to the god of the sun, Huitzilopochtli.
While archaeologists hypothesized that those sacrificed were men and other prisoners of war, this is actually not the case. “What we are seeing … is that [there were] women and children, too,” Rodrigo Bolanos, an anthropologist cooperating in the dig, told Reuters.
The purpose of the tower? A not-so-subtle “don’t mess with us” from the Aztecs directed at Spanish conquistadors.
Take a look at the archaeological site below.
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