The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice

Michael Harner's The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice is a genuinely controversial anthropological argument, proposing that large-scale Aztec human sacrifice functioned in part as a response to a shortage of animal protein in the Mesoamerican diet, published in a major peer-reviewed anthropology journal. The thesis attracted immediate and sustained criticism from other Mesoamericanists, who argued Harner both overstated the region's protein scarcity, given documented dietary staples like maize and beans, and understated the sacrifice's clearly religious and political functions within Aztec cosmology and imperial control. The materialist protein hypothesis is now a minority position within Aztec studies rather than an accepted explanation, cited today mainly as an example of a provocative but largely rejected functionalist theory, and any use of this source should present it as disputed rather than as an established account of sacrificial motive.