Which religious practice of pre-Columbian Aztec civilization was shared with the Maya, Zapotec, and Nicarao people?
Nicarao people The Nicarao people were a Nahuat-speaking Mesoamerican people that migrated from central and southern Mexico over the course of several centuries from approximately 700 AD onwards. Around 1200 AD, the Nicarao split from the Pipil people and moved into what is now Nicaragua. The migration of the Nicarao has been linked to the collapse of the important central-Mexican cities of Teotihuacan and Tula, as well as the Classic Maya collapse. The Nicarao settled in several pockets throughout western Nicaragua, particularly around the western shores of Lake Nicaragua. The Nicarao shared many cultural traits with their Aztec cousins, including an identical calendar, the use of screenfold books, the worship of closely-related deities, and the practice of human sacrifice.
Maya priesthood Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research came to dominate interest in the subject. A concept of royal 'shamanism', chiefly propounded by Linda Schele and Freidel, came to occupy the forefront instead. Yet, Classic Maya civilization, being highly ritualistic, would have been unthinkable without a developed priesthood. Like other Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican priesthoods, the early Maya priesthood consisted of a hierarchy of professional priests serving as intermediaries between the population and the deities. Their basic skill was the art of reading and writing. The priesthood as a whole was the keeper of knowledge concerning the deities and their cult, including calendrics, astrology, divination, and prophecy. In addition, they were experts in historiography and genealogy. Priests were usually male and could marry. Most of our knowledge concerns Yucatán in the Late Postclassic, with additional data stemming from the contemporaneous Guatemalan Highlands..