Site reveals mass child sacrifice
Anthropologists have found evidence of a mass ritual killing that involved the deaths of more than 140 children, three adults, and at least 200 young llamas on the northern coast of Peru.
The archaeological site, known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, represents one of the largest known cases of mass child sacrifice ever seen in the Americas.
Gabriel Prieto, a professor of archaeology from the National University of Trujillo who started excavating Huanchaquito-Las Llamas in 2011, said the discovery shocked him and his colleagues.
‘‘In Peru we are familiar with human bones, but in this particular case there were so many skeletons and they were all children,’’ he said. ‘‘It was astonishing.’’ The sacrificial victims ranged in age from 6 to 14, and appear to have been killed in a well-planned and choreographed event on a single, horrific day. Their mummified bones were found carefully arranged with their heads facing the ocean and their feet facing the mountains. Many of their remains were found with the bones of one or two young llamas lying on top of them.
The children, both boys and girls, all appear to have been killed in the same way — with a single horizontal slice across the sternum.
As if all this wasn’t gruesome enough, researchers say that many of the children’s rib cages appear to have been pried apart. This suggests that their hearts were removed shortly after they died.
‘‘We can’t prove it, but certainly in the Mayan world they described the importance of taking out a heart that was still beating,’’ said John Verano, an anthropologist at Tulane University in New Orleans and one of the leaders of the research, published yesterday in
According to radiocarbon dating of the excavated skeletons, the sacrificial event took place around 1450, when the complex and hierarchical Chimu empire ruled the region. The empire flourished from the 11th to the
15th century. At its height it stretched along more than
1000km of coastline, from the present-day border of Peru and Ecuador south to the modern city of Lima.
The Chimu oversaw an agricultural society that relied on a sophisticated network of hydraulic canals to irrigate fields. The capital city Chan Chan, located a few miles from where the city of Trujillo now sits, included palaces and gardens, plazas and temples. It was one of the largest urban settlements in the Americas. The HuanchaquitoLas Llamas site is about 3km north of Chan Chan, less than 400m from the ocean.
It was discovered in 2011 when residents noticed human and llama bones in eroding sand dunes along newly constructed roads in the area.
Prieto lobbied Peru’s Ministry of Culture to conduct an emergency excavation before any more archaeological material was lost, and his request was swiftly granted. Later, he and Verano were able to secure additional funding, including from the
,togo back to the site in 2014 and 2016.
In that first excavation season, Prieto and his team unearthed 43 children and 74 llamas. Almost immediately he knew it was not just a regular burial ground.
The children had been arranged lying on their sides rather than in a seated position, the more traditional burial posture in the Chimu culture. Not one of them was wearing a necklace of shell beads, and there were no ceramic offerings buried along with them. Some of the older children’s faces had been stained red with a face-paint made from cinnabar and were buried wearing ceremonial headdresses.
‘‘It was not typical of any burials we know,’’ Verano said.
And then there was that surehanded cut across the sternum on body after body, including on many of the llamas.
Anthropologists have known for decades that the Chimu occasionally engaged in mass killings. In the 1970s archaeologists working in Chan Chan found the remains of hundreds of young women who were sacrificed to attend to the king after his death. Researchers have also found the bones of 200 victims – including children, adults and the elderly — who were executed by Chimu warriors sometime around 1300.