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Dismembered bodies of 'fattened-up' Spanish conquistadors, women and toddlers were eaten by their cannibalistic Aztec captors, research reveals.

The bodies of more than 450 people were found at the ancient Zultepec-Tecoaque site in what is now modern day Mexico City. Experts say they were kept prisoner for six months, fed and then used in sacrificial enactment scenes from mythology.

They were members of a Spanish convoy from Cuba who reached Aztec territory in 1520, laden with supplies for Conquistador Hernan Cortes.

But they met a grisly end at the hands of their Aztec captors, who held them prisoner in doorless cells where they were 'fattened up' for sacrifice.

The Aztec inhabitants of Zultepec captured a convoy of about 15 male Spaniards, 50 women, 10 children and 45 foot soldiers in 1520. Over the next six months the town ate the prisoners - including toddlers and pregnant female 'warriors' whose heads were strung up on skull racks alongside their men.

Archaeologists have hailed it one of the greatest victories for the indigenous population of Mexico during the invasion of the continent, but just one year later the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire and toppled its capital city - Tenochtitlan.

The main reasons why Aztec human sacrifice has found, until not long ago, people who obstinately disbelieved that it was practiced are partly because anything so atrocious has hardly ever happened, to human knowledge, on such a scale, partly for political correctness and the Enlightenment idea of the “noble savage” – one of the consequences of which is that it’s allowed to criticize, accuse or blame only Europeans and their descendants –, and partly because the only witnesses of Aztec human sacrifices had been Spanish Conquistadors, who by definition could not be believed, in principle. ...

We have two sources that inform us of widespread Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism. One is the chronicles and history books written by the Spanish who either witnessed these atrocities or collected the accounts of witnesses, which is the method of historiography.

The second source is the original paintings portraying these acts made by the Aztecs themselves, who did not have writing and communicated mostly by images, a bit like, in Europe, the men from the Upper Palaeolithic Stone Age who left drawings and paintings on the walls of their caves, from which we can reconstruct scenes of their lives.

These form part of what has come to be known as Aztec Codices, namely research studies, collections and transcriptions of Aztecs pictorial documentation, which were the work of Spanish Catholic missionaries who lovingly collaborated with the Aztecs to recapture their past, language, and culture before they were lost.