Frozen Mummies from Andean Mountaintop Shrines: Bioarchaeology and Ethnohistory of Inca Human Sacrifice

MARÍA CONSTANZA CERUTI

BioMed Research International

Hindawi

Año: 2015 vol. 2015

2314-6133

The practice of human sacrifice has been known to occur cross-culturally throughout history. Humans have been sacrificed in order to celebrate special events, to mark royal funerals, in response to natural disasters, to atone for sins committed, to consecrate a special construction project or location, and to ensure fertility and health. Sacrificial victims have also been executed in order to serve as retainers to high-ranking individuals in the afterlife. During the Late Post Classic Period in ancient Mesoamerica, the Aztecs embarked upon the practice of ritual of human sacrifice involving the removal of hearts in epic proportions, based on their belief that human blood needed to be continuously offered to the Sun deity lest the god grow weak and not be able to continue his journey through the sky each day. The cruelty of these very public sacrificial events presumably served to reinforce the power of the Aztecs in the minds of allies as well as potential rivals. In the ancient South American Andes, evidence of human sacrificial practices has been found depicted on Moche pottery. The iconography of human sacrifice taking place on mountains seems to have been related to agricultural fertility rites and to the management of water resources. But it was almost eight centuries later, under the rule of the Inca civilization, that the practice of human sacrifice on mountaintop shrines reached its highest level of cultural elaboration and expression. In this presentation we will focus on the frozen bodies from Inca high altitude shrines as objects for bioarchaeological and ethnohistorical research, providing an overview on the procedures and justifications of human sacrifice among the Incas. According to the historical sources written during the Hispanic conquest, the Inca human sacrifices were performed in response to natural catastrophes, the death of the Inca emperor, or to propitiate the mountain spirits that grant fertility. The sacrifice of young individuals on Andean mountaintop shrines was designed to celebrate special events, to ensure the well being of the emperor, to mark a ruler?s passing into the afterlife, to promote agricultural prosperity, to consecrate a specific construction project or location, to appease the deities or to atone for sins. During the capacocha ceremonies, selected children and young acllas or ?chosen women? were taken in processions to the highest summits of the Andes to be sacrificed. They were believed to become messengers into the world of the mountain deities and the spirits of the ancestors. The Inca attributed commemorative, expiatory, propitiatory and or dedicatory motives to these sacrifices and this made the acceptance of the capacocha ritual by local Andean communities more feasible. The ritual violence (inherent to Inca human sacrifice) was cloaked in a bloodless ritual conducted on remote mountaintops and was based on belief in the efficacy of sacrificed children as supernatural mediators to the mountain deities. Additionally, the ?propaganda? value of convincing local elites that it was indeed an ?honor? to have one?s offspring sacrificed in the capacocha ceremony, would have constituted a very efficient ideological foundation for ensuring cooperation from local rulers during the phases of expansion and consolidation of the Inca Empire.