Children of the Ice
An
anthropologist finds the mummified
remains of three Incan sacrifices
by: David
Schrieberg and Sharon Begley Newsweek,
November 6, 1995
The
snowcapped volcanic peak in the Andean
cordillera looms majestic and forbidding
above the Peruvian town of Cabanaconde,
and for 500 years its summit has been
wreathed in pellucid ice as high as a
man’s thigh. But in 1993 the volcano
began furious eruptions, spewing nearby
Mount Ampato with hot ash. Into this land
of fire and ice Johan
Reinhard—conqueror of more than 100
Andean summits and restless searcher for
archeological remains of the great Inca
civilization—set out this summer on
what he figured would be a little
reconnaissance trip. For three days in
September he and his Peruvian climbing
partner, Miguel Zarate, trekked across
treacherous ice fields and braved the
Hiroshima-like clouds, dust and ash of
the sputtering volcano. When they reached
the summit ridge of Ampato at 20,700
feet, Reinhard, 51, was stunned to find
that the heat of the eruption had cleared
it of ice and snow—and thus of the
previously impenetrable layer of time
itself. Sticking out of the think ridge
were some feathers, the headdress of a
small, perfectly preserved statue. Two
others sat nearby. The men scrambled down
the ridge. There they spied the
archeological find of a lifetime: the
frozen, perfectly preserved body of an
Inca girl, her high cheekboned face and
soft hair completely exposed and her
body, curled into a fetal position, still
locked in the ice’s embrace.
She had
fallen from the summit above as the ice
melted and loosened her 500-year-old
grave. Sharing her icy coffin were shards
of ceramic and fragments of food, bits of
wood and pieces of bone. It was clearly
part of a ritual offering. The girl,
probably 12 to 14 at her death, was
"killed by Inca priests to appease
the gods, especially the god of the
mountain," says Reinhard, who
announced the find last week. She was
swathed in fine woolens, the outermost
one a chocolate brown adorned with
cream-colored stripes. As darkness and
snow fell, Reinhard and Zarate gathered
all the artifacts they could and then
carefully wielded their ice picks to
separate "Juanita," still in
ice, from the mountain to which she had
been offered so many centuries ago.
Stuffing her as best he could into his
backpack, Reinhard climbed out of the
crater and, with Zarate hacking footholds
in the perilously steep ice, carried her
off the summit.
The Ice
Child is at least the 11th
Inca sacrifice discovered. In 1954 a mule
keeper came upon the perfectly preserved
body of a 10-year-old girl in an ice cave
atop El Plomo near Santiago. Newspaper
accounts described "youthful
features" that bore "an
expression of sweetness and repose."
But unlike her predecessors, Juanita was
found frozen instead of freeze-dried. And
she has something as valuable in
archaeology as in real estate: location.
She is the first Inca sacrifice found
with such a complete stone burial
platform and base camp used by the
sacrificial party. "We have a
complete context," says
bioanthropologist Sonia Guillen, director
of the Mallqui ("mummy") Center
in Ilo, Peru. "We will have a better
idea of the ritual and what it means for
the reconstruction of this period of
Andean history." In particular,
Juanita might reveal "more about
Inca religion," says Inca scholar
Craig Morris of the American Museum of
Natural History in New York. "Did
they take many people to the summit to
witness the sacrifice? The size of the
base camp might speak to that. And who
exactly was performing the sacrifices?
What preparations went into them?"
Juanita
turns out to be only the tip of Mount
Ampato’s sacrificial iceberg. In
October, Reinhard, having enlisted the
logistical muscle of the National
Geographic Society, headed back up the
peak with an 18-person expedition. At
19,200 feet they found ritual platforms
"deliberately placed in crude
circles," Reinhard says. About a
foot underground, the team dug up another
mummy (so-called not because it was
embalmed, Egyptian style, but because the
cold and aridity of the mountaintop
preserved it so well). A girl, probably
10 to 12 years old, she wore an elaborate
headdress of pinkish red and had been
buried amid three distinct layers of
pottery. Nearby lay a third body, a child
of 12 to 14. Less well preserved, it is
mostly skeleton. They, too, died curled
in a fetal position.
The Inca
did not write, so archaeologists’
knowledge of their ceremonies and beliefs
is based largely on accounts of the
Spaniards. But since the conquistadors
were more intent on obliterating the
civilization than chronicling it, their
reports are considered suspect.
That’s why archeological finds such
as Reinhard’s are so important. And
already the inferences are flying fast
and furious, starting with how the
victims died. Since Juanita wears what
Reinhard describes as "a pleasant
expression," he suspects "that
she may have been drugged and buried
alive." Chicha—an
alcohol made from germinated
corn—was a likely sedative. (The
Plomo mummy had vomit stains on her
clothing, suggesting that she was in a
boozy stupor at the time of her death.)
Other sacrifices likely died by
strangling, smothering or a blow to the
head. The young victims were physically
unblemished, and were probably chosen
from families of middle to high school
rank, says Reinhard. Some urchin off the
street would hardly be a worthy offering.
But the third set of remains may be a
startling exception. Artifacts found
nearly were less valuable than those
found with the girls, raising the
possibility that he or she was a servant
chosen to serve the girl in the
afterlife.
Red
carpet: Archeologists have been in
the dark about the rituals surrounding
the sacrifice, and that’s where the
Ampato finds speak most eloquently.
"We’re getting a wealth of
information about the ceremonial
process," says Reinhard. Above the
two children, for instance, are bits of
sod and wild grass, probably carried up
on llamas and enough to cover a square
100 feet on a side. "They even built
a trail using grass and wood," says
Reinhard—perhaps the Inca version of
the red-carpet treatment leading the
young victim to the glorious beyond.
How often
were children offered to the gods? The
Inca sacrificed llamas as often as once a
day, says Morris of the American Museum,
but human offering were much rarer,
especially compared with the
sacrifice-happy Aztecs (box). Human
sacrifice was "tied in to the life
cycles of rulers, events in the royal
family, seasonal changes, agricultural
cycles, celestial events, celebrations of
birth and death," says archeologist
Tom Dillehay of the University of
Kentucky. Although the three mummies of
Ampato may have been killed as annual
offering at events such as Dillehay
describes, it is possible they gave their
lives for a more immediate payoff. To
build the sacrificial site on Ampato, the
Incas had to climb to the same spot
Reinhard did. That is possible only if
the nearby volcano, erupting, melted the
ice first. Reinhard suspects that
eruptions 500 years ago were
contaminating water supplies and spewing
ash over crops and pastures, and that the
children died to appease the mountain god
and quell its fire-spewing innards.
Sacred
peaks: That possibility fits nicely
with the reigning view of Inca religion.
Ever since 1980, when Reinhard began to
carve out a unique scholarly niche for
himself as a high-altitude archeologist,
he has been collecting evidence that
"the mountains were not merely the
homes of the gods," as he wrote in
National Geographic in 1992. "They
literally were the gods and could kill
with avalanche, rockfall, lightning,
blizzard, and wind or bless with
rain-filled clouds." The sanctity of
the snow-topped peaks is reflected in
Inca architecture. Windows often open
onto the sacred peaks; building stones
are often shaped like mountains. And the
importance of the mountains was reflected
in the Incas themselves. Some who lived
in the shadow of conical peaks deformed
their heads into points, the Spaniards
reported; some of those beneath a squat
mountain flattened the tops of their
heads, probably through binding like that
once inflicted on the feet of Chinese
girls. The Incas trekked 20,000 feet into
the clouds and gave a few of their
precious children to the mountain because
the mountain was a god.
Beyond
Inca religion, the ice mummies may speak
to larger questions of how the largest
and most powerful civilization in
pre-European America achieved cultural
and political cohesion. The Incas’
far-flung empire assembled through bloody
conquest as well as peaceful absorption
of almost 100 neighboring states,
stretched from southern Chile into
Colombia (map). At its pre-conquistador
height beginning in 1438, the population
reached an estimated 6 million. The
empire, though under the control of an
absolute rule (called the Inka) regarded
as the son of the sun, tolerated and even
encouraged home rule and cultural
diversity. Conquered states were
permitted to retain their original
religion. Perhaps finds such as those on
Ampato will show that there were imperial
sacrifices as well as local
sacrifices—and a centralized
imperial religion coexisting with local
practices. With finds like the ice
mummies, Morris says, "I think we
will begin to see how the Inca used
religion, as well as ideology and
politics, to control people and to
increase the cohesion of the society and
the strength of the empire."
DNA
test: All three mummies are now in a
deep freeze at Unversidad Catolica de
Santa Maria in Arequipa. Every evening
last week scientists led by Guillen
removed Juanita, and applying the lessons
learned with the "Iceman" found
in the Italian-Austrian Alps in 1991,
began to peel carefully away a few of
Juanita’s wrappings. At one session,
NEWSWEEK’S Sharon Stevenson reports,
green-suited researchers lifted the mummy
onto the table in the makeshift
laboratory. For an hour, they used a hair
dryer to warm cloths that they had laid
on the ice-filled blankets, and managed
to get the outermost blanket to fall
away, revealing the small girl’s
slim knees and shins. Attacking the thick
ice mounds embedded in the cloths,
Guillen probed the blankets with a
soldering iron, hissing the ice into
vapor puffs. Dr. Silvia Quevedo, a
Chilean bioanthropologist, explained that
"each layer of clothing has meaning
and describes the person"—her
social class, marital status, age and
other characteristics. Wrapped around
Juanita’s waist, the researchers
found, was a wide woven belt with tiny,
intricate geometric designs
characteristic of the Incas. Eventually,
the scientists hope to compare the
mummy’s DNA with modern samples and
establish which South American peoples
are closely related to the Inca.
"She’s
a lovely child," says Guillen.
Whatever good Juanita’s early death
brought to her people 500 years ago, she
is already proving herself an even more
precious treasure to archeologists today.
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A Gift from the
Gods by: Adriana Von
Hagen
The Lima Times,
November 1995
For over a decade,
American anthropologist Johan Reinhard
has scaled Andean peaks towering over
6,000 meters above sea level searching
for sanctuaries built more than 500 years
ago by the Incas.
His explorations have
taken him to the Andes of Chile and Peru,
where in September he discovered the
frozen body of a young Inca girl, who had
apparently been sacrificed to the
mountain gods and buried near the summit
of Mt. Ampato in Arequipa.
The information from
this find—many such sites have been
looted and few scientifically
excavated—will shed new knowledge on
Inca ritual, while studies of preserved
organs, tissues and body fluids could
reveal new insights on Inca health and
nutrition.
Reinhard and other
scholars have recorded some fifty sites
in the Andes located over 5,200 meters
above sea level and some perched as high
as 6,700 meters. "Nowhere else on
earth have archaeological remains been
found at such altitudes," says
Reinhard, who describes them as one of
the "most awesome accomplishments
known from ancient times."
The sites are often
only rows of stones or low walls
enclosing earthen platforms. Some are
more elaborate and include shelters that
housed those who took part in the
ceremonies, as well as llama corrals and
trails leading to the summit.
Discovering Juanita
The ancient
ceremonies on Mt. Ampato, a volcano
towering 6,300 meters above sea level in
Arequipa’s Cailloma province,
probably occurred sometime between 1450
and 1532, when the Spanish conquistadors
invaded the Inca empire.
A prolonged drought
may have exposed the snow-covered summit
or a volcanic eruption may have showered
the region with ash that contaminated
water sources and withered crops and
pastures. No doubt such a disaster caused
great anguish and sparked the rites and
sacrifices to the mountain gods.
The events which
provoked the Inca sacrifice may have been
similar to those which allowed
twentieth-century discovery. According to
Reinhard, hot volcanic ash from nearly
Mt. Sabancaya, which began erupted five
years ago, probably melted Ampato’s
icecap. Had it not been for the volcanic
activity on Sabancaya, the structures on
Ampato would have remained covered in ice
forever, he says.
"I figured the
mountain was permanently
snowcapped," Reinhard says. But when
he and his climbing partner Miguel Zarate
neared the summit after an arduous ascent
in early September—including a
torturous trek across an ice field
littered with sharp pinnacles—they
found Ampato nearly free of ice.
Suddenly, Reinhard
says, they spied feathers sticking out of
the 45-degree slope below a ridge leading
to the summit. They knew that the
feathers could only signal one thing: the
plumed headdresses that festoon the metal
or shell figurines offered by the Incas
to the mountain gods.
Scrambling down the
slope and carefully brushing away the
earth, they saw that the feathers topped
a two-inch-high gold female figurine
wrapped in finely-woven miniature
clothing; nearby lay two other female
figurines of sliver and Spondylus shell,
loosely covered in gravel.
Later, Reinhard
discovered that the earthern (sic)
platform built by the Incas on the summit
ridge had slipped down the slope when the
ridge collapsed, carrying the figurines
toward Ampato’s crater and tumbling
the frozen body of a young Inca girl,
still encased in ice, out of her tomb.
But Reinhard, who has
excavated mountaintop ruins in Chile and
on Picchu Picchu near Arequipa, was in a
quandary. Since he didn’t have a
permit he couldn’t excavate, but he
wasn’t going to leave the
mummy—nicknamed
"Juanita"—or the figurines
exposed to volcanic ash, strong sunlight
and snowfall. Worse yet, he couldn’t
leave them to treasure-seeking mountain
climbers, who have plundered many high
altitude Andean sanctuaries.
"As
archaeologists we have an obligation to
save Peru’s cultural heritage,"
he says, responding to criticism from the
director of Peru’s National
Institute of Culture, INC, who says
Reinhard should have left the finds on
Ampato and only retrieve them when he had
a permit.
"No way was I
going to leave the mummy or those
statues," Reinhard recalls. It was
only when he tried to lift Juanita that
he realized she was still frozen, but her
face, exposed to the sunlight, had begun
to dessicate (sic). Although she is third
frozen mummy discovered in the Andes,
Juanita is the only mummy to remain
frozen.
"You’re at
20,000 feet, you’ve had nothing to
eat, it’s snowing and it’s
getting dark," says Reinhard,
recalling the day they found Juanita. The
two men decided to leave her and return
the following day. "Getting her down
was a saga."
As Zarate dug steps
into the steep, ice-covered slope,
Reinhard, with forty kilos of Juanita
perched on his backpack, descended Mt.
Ampato.
Halfway down, Zarate
went ahead to fetch the muleteer who was
waiting for them at the base of the
mountain. They loaded Juanita on the
donkey, covering her in sleeping pads
(sic) to insulate her against the
burro’s warmth.
For thirteen hours,
the three men, "with only a
ten-minute break and a tin of
sardines," walked until they reached
Cabanaconde, a small town in the Colca
valley. Zarate took a bus to Arequipa
with Juanita bundled in the luggage
compartment. "She just looked like a
big bundle—much too heavy for anyone
to steal," says Reinhard. Clutching
the figurines, he followed in another
bus. In Arequipa, Zarate found a freezer
large enough to accommodate Juanita and
handed her over to archaeologists at the
Unversidad Catolica de Santa Maria.
After weeks of
negotiations with the INC for a permit to
excavate the Ampato sanctuary, Reinhard,
a team of archaeologists from
Arequipa’s Unversidad Catolica and a
film crew from the National Geographic
Society, which funded the excavations,
returned to Ampato.
Much to
Reinhard’s surprise, they discovered
pits below the summit that contained two
other bodies, both young children.
To ease the
excavations in the rockhard permafrost,
the archaeologists melted snow and poured
the boiling water around the pits to thaw
the ground.
One of the bodies is
shrouded in a feather headdress that has
fallen over the face, molding it. The
other body is a skeleton; both are too
young to determine their sex. In one of
the tombs archaeologists unearthed fifty
ceramic bowls, forty of which are intact,
as well as keros, wooden beakers used to
drink chicha, maize beer, and another
seven figurines.
Below the summit the
crew found remains of the camp built by
the people who conducted the ceremonies
and sacrificed Juanita and the two other
children—an area strewn with ichu
grass, llama dung, charcoal, sandals and
the remains of poles that probably
supported a tent.
Mountain worship
But what spurred the
Incas to scale this Mt.
Ampato—without oxygen or modern
climbing equipment—build the
sanctuary and carry out rites and
sacrifices on the summit?
Scholars have long
known that the Incas and other Andean
peoples worshipped mountains. Some people
considered the mountains as their
ancestors where the souls of the dead
went to reside.
Others, especially the
highest peaks, says Reinhard, were
believed to control weather. This, he
explains, is based on sound observations:
clouds gather on mountains and clouds
bring rain, snow, frost, hail, thunder
and lightning.
For a people who
depended on rainfall for the fertility of
their crops, the gods could be generous
and bring rain; but if the gods were
angry they could send hail and destroy
seedlings or cause drought, which brought
famine and killed the pastures that
nurtured llama and alpaca herds.
They believed that
offerings to the mountains appeased the
gods. And because rainfall was so vital
to the lives of Andean people the gods
were lavished with valuable gifts:
llamas, human figurines of precious metal
and shell swathed in miniature garments,
coca leaves, and occasionally, the most
precious offering of all—human life.
As shocking and cruel
as human sacrifice, especially that of
young children, seems to us, some Andean
people believed that when people died
they joined their ancestors, who watched
over people and villages from their lofty
mountaintop sanctuaries.
Bernabe Cobo, a
seventeenth-century Jesuit chronicler,
noted that those chosen to be sacrificed
considered it a great honor, believing
they "would be favored by having
their souls rest in great peace."
We know little of how
those who came before the Incas
worshipped mountains. But from the
chroniclers—the soldiers, priests
and officials who accompanied the Spanish
conquistadors—we know that the Inca
sacrifice ceremony was part of an
elaborate ritual known as the capac
bucha, or royal obligation.
The Inca rulers had
obligations to their subjects and, in
turn, the citizens of Tawantinsuyu, as
the Inca called their sprawling empire,
had responsibilities to fulfill. First
and foremost among the obligations of the
citizens was to provide the Incas with a
labor force. This was founded on commonly
shared Andean views of communal work and
based on a sense of reciprocity that
carefully balanced rights and
obligations. The Andean gods were also
part of this give and take and had to be
pampered and proferred (sic) offerings to
ensure rainfall and prevent natural
disasters such as earthquakes or
landslides.
Every year young boys
and girls from all over the realm came to
Cuzco, the capital. The Incas, noted
Cobo, collected the children "by way
of tribute throughout the
kingdom…the males were children of
about ten years of age or younger, and
some females…were the same age as
the boys, others were maidens fifteen or
sixteen years of age…They could not
have any blemish or even a mole on their
entire body."
Human sacrifice took
place at the beginning and end of the
agricultural cycle, especially at the
onset of the rainy season, or when an
Inca emperor fell ill or died, or
"for things of great importance such
as times of pestilence, famine, war, or
other great disasters….[or] such as
when the Inca took the crown and sceptre
of the kingdom," wrote Cobo.
And unlike many of the
accounts in the chronicles, in this
ritual the chroniclers’ descriptions
are borne out by archaeology.
Unwrapping Juanita
Sonia Guillen, a Peruvian
bioarchaeologist who is painstakingly
unwrapping Juanita, believes her organs
and tissues are intact and haven’t
decomposed—a first in Andean
archaeology. But getting to the body is a
daunting undertaking. Ice had adhered
Juanita’s clothing to her body,
especially to areas where there is little
tissue, like the neck.
It took several days
of carefully wielding a soldering iron to
vaporize the ice—without scorching
the fabric—just to untie the frozen
knot below Juanita’s chin that held
the outer garment, a striped cloak
fastened by a wide belt.
Beneath, Guillen says,
Juanita is wearing an acsu—a
long tunic with openings for the neck and
arms—cinched by a belt.
The llicla, or
shawl, covering her shoulders is held by
three tupus, shawl pins, possibly
bronze—the pins haven’t been
analyzed yet. Both Juanita’s cloak
and belt are woven in a local style of
the Arequipa region, while her tunic and
shawl appear to be from Cuzco.
Once Guillen and her
team have removed the clothing and shawl
pins, a CAT scan will determine how
intact Juanita’s organs are. Rather
than an autopsy Guillen will carry out
what she calls a "conservative
dissection" to retrieve lung and
liver tissue as well as muscle tissue to
run DNA tests. And Juanita’s stomach
contents will reveal her last meal.
Guillen notes that her
"peaceful expression" indicates
Juanita didn’t die violently but
probably died of exposure. Cobo wrote
that some of the children were given
chicha and lapsed into a drunken stupor,
never to wake up. Others were
"strangled with a cord or [had]
their throats slit."
"You
don’t offer a dead girl to a
mountain god," Guillen says.
"She was alive when she reached the
summit."
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