> This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda,
There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years.
> Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
Not so much.
And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.
While this is still debated by a few hold outs, This is one where Wikipedia is out of date. Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 and it is now generally held by historians and archeologists that it did in fact happen. Archeoloists questioned Plutarch, and Plutarch won.
I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
Does this kind of question depend on what you consider to be the baseline of normal human behaviour? That defines what side of an argument evidence is required. Surely it is possible that human sacrifice was common throughout human history, and that the last couple of thousand years were the exception. How can you know?
There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years.
> Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
Not so much.
And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.