Which religious practice of pre-Columbian Aztec civilization was shared with the Maya, Zapotec, and Nicarao people?
Human sacrifice in Aztec culture Human sacrifice was a religious practice of the pre-Columbian Aztec civilization, as well as other Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Maya and the Zapotec. The extent of such practices is debated by modern scholars, but scholars agree that human sacrifice was a major part of Aztec worship and that some human victims were cannibalized.
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..