Perhaps most bizarre, three skeletons mingled in doubled-over positions include the skull of a woman who appears to have been decapitated. In another, a teenager's clearly-decapitated head was arranged amid dog bones. The bones of two children lay placed among them. In one case, a middle-aged woman's skeleton, her skull dented by three hammer blows, lay atop a younger woman's skeleton pinned under two large grinding stones. We may be seeing several different types of rituals." "These are big questions of life and death and what they believed. "Understanding what they intended is the million-dollar question in Celtic ritual practices," Selinsky says. Later Roman-era burials at the site, in contrast, are in rows of coffins and cremation urns, unlike the Galatian ones, with one exception. Bones and skulls from more than a dozen men, women and children arranged in odd ways appear to have been scattered around the site, in six clusters. The other thing that takes on a Celtic appearance at the time, Selinsky reports in her study, is a graveyard. They decorated sacrifice sites with ghoulish entanglements of human bones, perhaps as a warning to foes and the folks they ruled. What were those Celts (pronounced with a hard "K" sound) doing in Turkey? Well, in a forthcoming study in the Journal of Osteoarchaeology by archaeologist Page Selinsky of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, it seems they were definitely continuing some startling ritual murder practices. "And they were definitely Celts at Gordion." "The ancient Celts were most definitely head-hunters," prone to displaying these trophies, says anthropologist Mary Voigt, who has long headed the Penn Museum's excavations at the storied site of Gordion in modern-day Turkey. Halloween brings trick-or-treaters, candy and rather macabre displays of skeletons and graves suddenly dotting suburban lawns.Īll in fun, but for the ancient Celts who cooked up the autumn festival of S amhain, a predecessor to today's Halloween, a new study confirms such displays were serious business.
This form of human sacrifice was seen as a high honor in their ancient society. However, it was found that it was actually the heads of the winner that were decapitated and displayed. It was first assumed that the losers’ heads were displayed on the platform. The ancient ball court game was popular in the region and was celebrated by the civilization. This was discovered in later studies after extensive research on different texts of Mesoamerican hieroglyphics. The ritual that was involved in displaying decapitated heads was part of a game. Finally, a ceremony involving human sacrifice is displayed.
Next, there are images of skeleton warriors dancing. Then there is a depiction of eagles feasting on human hearts. First, there is a scene of the skull rack. There are four themes depicted on the platform. The Toltecs were known to have introduced human sacrifices to the Itzas when they conquered the land centuries before the Spanish arrived. The platform walls of this beautiful structure have very interesting carvings that were made by Toltecs. This structure was actually used to publicly display the skulls of sacrificial victims or captives of war. The word “tzompantli” literally means rack of skulls. Tzompantli is an ancient Mayan ruin that is a Toltec structure. Tzompantli at Chichen Itza is located in Yuctan, Mexico and is known as The Wall of Skulls. Photo by: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen Creative Commons
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