The bodies of about 140 children and 200 animals were found in ancient oceanside burial pits in Peru.
Human children remains found at a huge sacrificial site called Huanchaquito-Las Llamas in northern coastal Peru. By Ben Guarino Ben Guarino Reporter covering the practice and culture of science Email Bio Follow March 6 at 2:00 PM Archaeologists working in Peru have found what they say is the site of the largest known child sacrifice in the world. About 140 children and more than 200 animals, probably llamas, were killed in the middle of the 1400s.
The site was less than a kilometer — about a 15-minute walk — from the ancient Chimú metropolis of Chan Chan, the largest city in pre-Columbian South America. That the Chimú sacrificed children here, and in such numbers, came as a surprise to researchers. Archaeologists knew the Inca people, who conquered the Chimú at the end of the 15th century, killed children in mountaintop rituals. But before this research, no similar accounts existed for the Chimú.
Many world religions refer to child sacrifice, Verano said, such as the binding of Isaac in the Bible. But archaeological evidence is rare, and attributing sacrifice as the cause of death for human remains is often difficult. Not so in this case. “It is disturbing and disquieting to see the sacrifice of children on any scale,” he said. “We study sacrifice not for the gruesome detail, but as anthropologists and bioarchaeologists, our reasoning is to reconstruct a larger living world.”
“Around 1450, that was right at the peak of Chimú power, at their greatest moment,” Verano said. The mass sacrifice “is something that was directed by a state-level society.” The Chimú civilization was a powerful empire along north Peru, with millions of inhabitants. They fished along the coast and raised herds of llamas for meat and alpacas for wool.The region is arid and receives about a tenth of an inch of rain a year.
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