British Museum visit, 2006

Belt template

The native Mexican cultures were quite a bloodthirsty bunch. Bloodletting and human sacrifice formed a large part of their belief systems. Several times, I found myself reading about an innocuous-looking artefact on display, only to find that it was involved in some gruesome practice or other. Take this harmless-looking stone object, for example. It's actually a template for a leather belt. A strip of leather would be moulded onto it in order to press the pattern onto the leather. Sounds fairly safe, until one learns that the belts formed part of the uniform for a ball game used to settle disputes. The winner got to sacrifice the loser...

---

---

$Id: gallery_picture.rbx,v 1.5 2007/01/03 12:46:30 stephen Exp $
$Id: gallery_lib.rb,v 1.6 2007/01/02 14:23:38 stephen Exp $