Inca fattened kids for sacrifice
Like cattle being prepared for slaughter, some peasant children taken by the Inca were fattened up for months before being ritually sacrificed to the gods, a sequence of events calculated both to elevate the victims’ value to the gods and to strike fear into subjugated peoples, British researchers reported this week.
Beginning about a year before the sacrifice, the children’s diets were switched from their normal fare of potatoes and similar vegetables to one rich in corn and meat, a change typically associated with elevation of status from peasant to elite, according to archeologist Andrew S. Wilson of the University of Bradford in England.
In the days and weeks before their deaths, their diets were switched to primarily corn at way stations along the trails from the capitol of Cuzco to the lofty peaks where the children met their fate, Wilson and his colleagues reported in Tuesday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is the very first time we are hearing the account from the individuals themselves -- what they were eating and when they were separated from their normal existence and set on this path,” Wilson said.
That account came from hair samples from four frozen 500-year-old mummies. One was a 15-year-old girl whom archeologists dubbed Sarita, found in 1996 at the 18,000-foot-high summit of Peru’s Sara Sara volcano. The other three were found in 1999 in a shrine 75 feet from the top of the 21,100-foot-high Llullaillaco volcano: the 15-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden, the 7-year-old Llullaillaco Boy and the 6-year-old Lightning Girl, so known because she had been struck by at least one bolt.
Because the bodies were frozen naturally shortly after death, all were remarkably well preserved. Analysis of isotope ratios in the hair allowed the researchers to deduce a wealth of information about diet.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA from the hair showed that none of the children were related. The hair studies also showed that the children were given coca and, perhaps, hallucinogenic drugs to help them acclimate to the altitude and to make them more accepting of their fate.
The researchers are not sure precisely how the children died, but they were probably drugged and left to die from exposure to the elements.
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