For the first time ever museum goers in Salta, Argentina, got to see 'la Donacella' or 'The Maiden,' the mummified remains of a 15 year old girl which were found in 1999 on Lullailaco volcano along with a 6 year old girl and a 7 year old boy.
The children of Lullailaco are supposed to have been sacrificed about 500 years ago in a ceremony to mark the annual corn harvest.Dressed in fancy clothes and given coca leaves to chew as well as corn alcohol which put them to sleep they were left to die on the hilltop as human sacrifices.
Inca mummies consist of two main types.The mummies of the rulers and the mummies of the sacrificed ones.Most of the mummies of the rulers were kept in the city of Cuzco. None of them have been found as they were destroyed during the Spanish conquest of Peru. Most of the mummies of the rulers were destroyed by Pizarro who was a devout Catholic and was greatly disturbed by the Inca's worship of their dead ancestors. He therefore gave the order to burn the mummies after conquering the Incas. On the other hand mummies of sacrificed children have been found in excellent condition as they were mummified and preserved by the freezing temperature and the dry mountain air.
"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuya is the name the Incas gave their empire. It stretched 2500 miles from North to South along the high Andean mountain range from Colombia to Chile and stretched West to East from the coastal Atacama desert to the Amazon rain forest. At its peak the Incan Empire was the largest nation on Earth and remains the largest native state to have existed in the Western Hemisphere. The wealth and sophistication of the Incas has lured countless anthropologists and archaeologists to the Andean mountains to study the Incas.
A mummy is nothing but an old dead body but it still retains some of the soft tissues it had when it was alive, usually skin but sometimes organs and muscles as well. Mummies are formed when bacteria are prevented from destroying the dead body. Sub-zero temperatures, coupled with a low oxygen environment therefore produced excellent mummies, like the present one.
Very little is known about Capacocha, the sacred Inca ceremony of human sacrifices, but with the discovery of each new mummy more is revealed.
Sacrifices were often made during or after a portentous event such as an earthquake, an epidemic, or drought or after the death of an Inca Emperor. Inca sacrifices often involved the child of a chief. The sacrificed child was thought of as a deity, ensuring a tie between the chief and the Inca Emperor who was considered a descendant of the Sun God.
On the day of the sacrifice the child would be fed Chicha, a maize alcohol to ease its suffering. Investigations have shown that many of the children had died a violent death. Most of the mummies have been found with fractured skulls.
The Inca Empire along with its barbaric rituals and practices was destroyed by the Spanish conqueror Pizarro in the sixteenth century.