Chauvet Cave was first discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet in 1995. It is located in southeast France and has been dated between 30,000 and 33,000 years B.P. (Before the Present). These dates place the drawings in the Auriganacian, or the early Upper Paleolithic period. This era is defined by the functionally flexible stone tool industry, their manufacture of body ornaments and sophisticated cave art. 
Art of the Aurignacian era can be separated into two groups. The first is portable art which began appearing about 35,000 B.P. and is made up of carvings such as the Venus figurine. The second group is stationary art, or parietal art, mainly made up of cave drawings and paintings. Over Europe, the majority of cave art depicts animals with an overwhelming representations of animals of significant economic value like horse, reindeer, bison, aurochs, ibex, and mammoth along with carnivores such as lions, bears and wolves. Chauvet Cave particularly seems to contain a surprisingly large number of carnivores, with at least thirty-three figures making up almost fourteen percent of the animal figures. The carnivores represented include mainly bears and large cats including at least one spotted panther. These animals, especially the felines, are consistently among the most inaccurately proportioned with their canine teeth substantially larger than in real life. This may be because the large cats are harder to observe than other common animals such as the horse and bison, however, their teeth do seem to attract a lot more attention in general. Not only were the carnivores the only animals drawn with teeth but also their teeth were used as jewelry.
It is hard today to interpret the art of the Upper Paleolithic because so much has changed over the 30,000 years since its creation. When studying Paleolithic art we are only observing a small proportion what was made, only the surviving art is accessible to us. While art historians often view this early cave art as the ‘awakening’ of a human instinct to study the world around them, the majority of pre-historians believe instead that it is part of a wider cultural behavior. One suggestion is that the art represented a type of communication related to the movement and behavior of animals, perhaps in response to planned hunting activities. This hypothesis shows a marked shift from the idea of symbolism towards one focused on the communication of information about the surrounding environment. At any rate, the majority of experts agree that the people creating the drawings are copying images and scenes from real life. It is, however important to note, that while many of the drawings found probably do represent some greater thought or idea, there may be a certain percentage of meaningless scrawl made by amateurs or practicing children.
Following Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in 1532, the Spanish chronicles of the era detailed many of the practices and rites of the subjugated Incan empire. Of these, perhaps the most shocking to the invading conquistadors was the Incan’s ”capacocha” ceremony: child sacrifice.
The chronicles tell us that sacrifice followed all major events in the life of the emperor: ascension to the throne, the birth of a son, death and so on. Such rites were also thought prevent illness, strengthen armies for battle and ensure the survival of the Incan people through appeasement of the gods.
One particular type of sacrifice, however, was said to please them more than any other. At mountaintop altars in the Andes, some 20,000 feet above sea level, Incan priests carved makeshift grottoes that would hold offerings such as statues of golden llamas, foodstuffs like peanuts and jerky and, often, a sleeping child. To the Incans, the peaks of the Andes were not just the home of the gods; rather, they were the gods themselves. The children’s mission in this life and the next would be service the gods in perpetuity from the top of the world.
Given the important role that the children were to play in the Inca’s mythological drama, they were not selected randomly and most were born into priestly or otherwise elevated castes. When their time came – usually between the ages of 9 and 14 – the chosen child would be adorned with bird feathers, symbolically painted with bright pigments and dressed in his or her finest clothes. They would then be subdued with maize beer or coca leaves and carried away from their parents - who themselves weren’t permitted to show emotion at the loss of their son or daughter. They were, after all, going to be worshipped alongside the gods.
From there, the ceremonial procession would carry their sacrifice a mountaintop of a priest’s choosing. The sedated children, after being pinned under a pile of stones with the rest of the day’s offerings, were then left to die of exposure. Jesuit missionary, Bernabe Cobo, speculated in 1652 that not all of the sacrifices were always interred alive, but were instead dealt a coup de grace prior to burial.
Cobo’s guess was confirmed in 1995, when archaeologists uncovered mummified body of an Incan girl at the summit of Nevado Ampato in southern Peru. A blow to the head killed her, shortly before she was frozen by the extreme conditions of the mountaintop. It was a process that would preserve her corpse for the next five centuries.
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Like all of the Incan sacrifice victims recovered from the Andes, the girl’s body had been unintentionally mummified. Unlike the Egyptians, who ritualistically dried and stuffed their dead to prevent decomposition, the Incan “mummies” just happened to be exposed to the precise conditions for natural freeze drying - a process that left their bodies, clothes and even expressions fully in tact. To date, nearly forty Incan mummies have been recovered from southern Peru to central Chile – and every one of them presents a perfectly preserved insight into the clothes, food, art and religion of a civilization long since vanished. | |||||||||||
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