Aztec Cannibalism: An Ecological Necessity?

Aztec Cannibalism, An Ecological Necessity?, by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, published in Science in 1978, is a peer reviewed critique of the widely publicized theory, advanced by Michael Harner and popularized by Marvin Harris, that Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism functioned as a response to protein scarcity. Ortiz de Montellano, trained in both chemistry and anthropology, argued the nutritional math behind the protein hypothesis does not hold up against the actual scale of Aztec sacrifice and the available alternative food sources. Its strength is that direct quantitative rebuttal in the same journal and idiom the original ecological materialist argument used, a specialist checking another specialist's numbers rather than a general objection. Its limit is that it is one contribution to a debate that continued well past 1978, with later scholars proposing other explanations for Aztec human sacrifice beyond both the protein hypothesis and this article's own critique, so it should be read as refuting one specific theory rather than settling the wider question of why the practice occurred.