Dr. Brian Hayden: I'm Brian Hayden. I'm a professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University and I've undertaken some work in Meso America, especially Guatemala, Southern Mexico, amongst the highland Mayans.
Bloodletting in Meso America was used primarily for curing and also for ritual purposes, especially if somebody had done something wrong. Bloodletting consists of making an incision in various parts of the body, and they can occur on the head or on the arms or parts afflicted. Sometimes it is far removed from the part that is afflicted for curative purposes. So for curative bloodletting, there would be small pieces of glass or small pieces of bone, sometimes snake teeth or snake fangs, that would be used to make small incisions in the head or the arm and draw small amounts of blood. It could vary; sometimes they made a lot of these, so there were thirty or forty small incisions, which created a lot of blood. And it was thought that the blood would take away the disease-causing influences. And then we have the ritual cures, the ritual bloodlettings. These, going back in time, were fairly long pieces of obsidian, pointed lancets, or stingray spines, or cactus spines, things like that. Today, these have been largely replaced by a wax ball, about this big, that's studded with all sorts of small splinters of glass. And so it looks like a porcupine back almost; it's bristling with all of these splinters of glass. Then this would be either flung over the back and your back would be hit with this ball, this wax ball, and lots of blood would come out as a result of that, or somebody else would hit you with it. This was done to atone for sins or to ask for favours from the saints, the gods, or the spirits, things like that. I found this going on in highland Mayan communities. That's where I've documented most of the material that we have in the museum here, but it was much more widespread than that. It was well known from the Aztecs who loved blood and, as you probably know, especially other people's blood, but their own as well. So it's very, very widespread. It's sort of a characteristic of the entire Meso American area.