Early accounts of Maya civilization by Spanish colonial observers frequently emphasized spectacular and violent elements of Maya religious practice.

The colonial project of religious conversion required the discrediting of indigenous religious traditions, and descriptions of sacrifice served this purpose.

The result was that some early accounts exaggerated, distorted, or decontextualized the sacrificial practices they described.

Later scholarship, in the twentieth century, sometimes reacted against these early accounts by minimizing or denying the evidence for sacrifice in Maya civilization — particularly against the evidence of human sacrifice, which had been associated with the Aztec civilization and was sometimes assumed to be alien to the Maya tradition.

This reaction was understandable as a correction to colonial-era distortions, but it sometimes went too far, dismissing evidence that was real.