Self-sacrifice was also quite common; people would offer maguey thorns, tainted with their own blood [9] and would offer blood from their tongues, ear lobes, or genitals. [10][11] Blood held a central place in Mesoamerican cultures. read more
These sources don't do much in the way of granting us a sense of the number of people sacrificed by the Aztecs or any Mesoamerican culture and they, just like later colonial sources, had every incentive to exaggerate the scale of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica. read more