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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