A spiritually enveloping, time-consuming, and value-creating set of activities, Aztecs centered their religion on powerful spiritual beings. Ceremony and time were fundamental parts of everyday life. From the smallest household to the largest city, rituals of offering to the gods took place every day as Aztecs sought water, food, the survival of human life, and balance in what they perceived to be a chaotic spiritual and material world. In their dynamic universe, deities and their human embodiments and priests and priestesses manifested great power. Ceremonies conducted for those beings, the offerings presented to them, and exchanged or distributed provide examples of the power and energy that offerings, including living humans, provided. Time-keeping focused on the notion of progressive ages, the idea of cyclical time, and two calendar systems. Their calendars used two ways of keeping track of days and months for ceremonies, agriculture, and war. Aztecs drew blood for human and plant fertility, purification, and to nourish and repay their debt to the creator deities. Yet the greatest offering human beings could give was to provide human lives, offering hearts and blood, though they did not do so in the numbers often suggested.

The ritualisation of violence in Iron Age Europe has long been seen through the distorting lens of classical literary sources. Signs of perimortem trauma and the complex processing of human remains have typically been seen as evidence for Druidic sacrifice or the ‘Celtic cult of the head’. This chapter presents a more anthropological perspective, drawing analogies with societies documented through the ethnographic literature. Evidence for ritualised killing in the Iron Age comes from bodies found preserved in peat bogs, who suffered extremely violent deaths. Similarly, complex killings are represented by skeletal evidence from archaeological sites ranging from small settlements to large religious complexes. Despite differences in scale, similar cosmological principles underlie these sorts of practices across the Continent. Particularly common is a concern with the removal, curation and display of the human head; rather than representing a singular ‘cult of the head’, however, headhunting was a complex and recurrent practice that altered its character and meaning through time. The ritualisation of warfare is also implicit in the design of major hill forts and oppida. Overall, the archaeological evidence suggests that ritualised violence was a core element of the religious and cosmological beliefs that underpinned social relations in Iron Age Europe.