Viaje al Mictlán: una revisión crítica sobre el destino de las almas y los ritos funerarios en las fuentes tempranas y los contextos arqueológicos del Posclásico

Abstract

These essay reviews three central aspects of the post-Classic Nahua conception of death: the dispersion of the souls that comprise the person, the many rituals associated with the causes of death, and the mortuary treatments related with them. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we review the early colonial documents –commonly used by various researchers to raise the ideas and practices surrounding the death of the individual– and compare them with the archaeological data and the modern ethnography. Through this comparison it could be demonstrated first that the various authors of colonial sources differ in the descriptions they gave about the same topic. Secondly, only certain types of mortuary archaeological contexts can be related to burial treatments described in the sources; in fact, most of the treatments lack an archaeological equivalent. Finally, based on a group of colonial documents and archaeological data, we propose that the common treatment for the dead was the burial and not cremation.