Traditionally, every month in the Nahua ceremonial calendar had seen sacrificial victims die, but by the end of Moctezuma’s reign, so many were killed in Tenochtitlan every month that a significant number of priests had to have worked full time preparing for, orchestrating, and then cleaning up after the deaths. They cleaned the skulls and plastered them into great tzompantlis (skull racks). They no longer killed only specially arrayed impersonators of the god but also a variable number of ordinary captives, whose dead bodies, sprawled on the lower steps, were understood to receive the god
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