Somewhere around 6,000 meters above sea level, on the slopes of Ampato volcano in southern Peru, a child was buried. She was probably around six years old. She didn’t make it back down.
Neither did three others found nearby, or another girl recovered from the Sara Sara volcano during expeditions in the 1990s. All were part of the capacocha, the Inca ritual of child sacrifice that ranked among the most elaborate ceremonial acts the empire performed. The children selected for it were considered extraordinary. Some came from provincial elites. Others were drawn from the acllahuasi, the institution that housed women dedicated to the sun cult. Spanish chronicles describe the chosen as “beautiful and unblemished.” That language tells you something about what the Incas believed they were giving up.
What actually happened to these four children, in physical terms, has been only partially understood. A CT scan of Ampato #1 was conducted at Johns Hopkins in 1996, but those results were never formally published. X-rays of Ampato #2 and #4 taken in 2019 were degraded by the presence of stones and metal objects in the burial bundles. Sara Sara’s skull trauma was known from a single unpublished radiograph. The bioarchaeological picture was incomplete.
A new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports1 changes that. A team led by Dagmara M. Socha and colleagues including Johan Reinhard, one of the original discoverers of several of these mummies, performed CT scans on all four individuals at a clinic in Arequipa, Peru. The scans are the most detailed imaging these remains have ever received, and what they show is stranger and more varied than a single narrative of Inca sacrifice would suggest.
