Mesoamerican peoples practiced a rich variety of funeral rites based on a fundamental and widely shared vision of death as a regenerative social and cosmic power. Several types of sacred practices associated with death existed from the Preclassic period (2500 BCE–200 CE) until the arrival of the Spanish. The discussion that follows will survey two general kinds of rites associated with the dead; funerary rites and mortuary rites. Funerary rites were those actions performed after the death of an individual. Their goal was to dispose of the body, ensure the arrival of the soul to the netherworld, and socialize the loss. Mortuary rites, on the other hand, equipped individuals with an object or offering. The more common examples are sacrificial offerings, which were performed since very early times.

A third type of death ritual appears in the archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence during the late Postclassic...