Archaeologists find evidence of human sacrifice in all corners of the globe. But what they saw in the north of Peru in the vicinity of the ancient capital of the Chimu people, Chan-Chan, shocked even experienced researchers: the remains of 269 children with traces of cut wounds on the sternum and ribs. Who committed this terrible murder and why?
The owner of a local pizzeria, Miguel Spano, holds a photograph of the remains of one of the first children discovered in Huanchakito. Spano told archaeologist Gabriel Prieto about the bones sticking out of the ground in a vacant lot opposite his house, convincing him to start excavating. "You will become famous!" - predicted Spano.
Friday before Easter in the village of Huanchaquito on the northern coast of Peru. 500 years ago, there was a ritual cemetery here, which has long turned into a wasteland littered with garbage.
The rhythms of dance music emanating from coastal cafes a few hundred meters to the east eerily resemble a heartbeat. They are echoed by the dull grinding of shovels as workers rake up broken glass, plastic bottles and spent shotgun cartridges, revealing the outline of a small burial ground.
Spread out on either side of the grave, two students of archeology, dressed in surgical suits and masks, begin to scoop it up with scoops.
After a while, a child's skull is shown, crowned with a shock of black hair. Changing scoops for tassels, the young men carefully brush away loose sand from the underside of the skull and humerus, sticking out from under the rough cotton shroud, and their gaze opens the remains of a tiny llama lying along the child's skeleton.
Archaeologists Gabriel Prieto (with a tassel, in a light shirt) and John Verano (far left, with a camera), along with their team, excavate shallow graves in Huanchachito. Soon after the end of the excavations of this complex, archaeologists discovered the second place of sacrifice of children - in nearby Pampa la Cruz.
Gabriel Prieto, an archaeologist at the National University of Trujillo, examines the grave and nods. E95, he announces, as if making a move in endless chess. Prieto is counting the victims: this is the 95th find since 2011, when he began to investigate the mass grave. In total, the remains of 269 children from 5 to 14 years old and three adults will be found in two adjacent graves. All of them died more than 500 years ago in the course of elaborate sacrifices - perhaps, such rituals, either before or after, were not known in world history.
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"Well, I never expected!" Prieto exclaims, shaking his head in disbelief. The archaeologist repeats these words like a mantra, trying to comprehend the strange finds from Huanchaquito Las Llamas. Nowadays, the violent death of even one child will not touch only the hardest heart, and the specter of mass murder terrifies any normal person. And scientists are lost in conjecture: what kind of desperate circumstances could have prompted people to such a monstrous act?
A headdress of blue and yellow macaw feathers adorns the skull of a long-haired child sacrificed. According to scientists, the headdress may indicate the noble origin of the killed.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence of human sacrifice in every corner of the globe. The number of victims could be in the hundreds - apparently, they were often prisoners of war, or those who fell in ritual battles, or servants put to death after the death of the leader or during the construction of a temple. Ancient texts, including the Old Testament, contain references to child sacrifices, but for archaeologists such burials of children are very rare. Before the discovery of Huanchachito, the site of the largest child sacrifices in the Americas - and perhaps on the entire planet - was the main temple in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City), where 42 children were killed in the 15th century.
Prieto grew up in Huanchaco, a town near Huanchaquito. As a child, he looked for beads near a Spanish church on top of a high hill - this was his first excavation. He recalls how in the afternoon he often ran to the southern border of the city, to the ruins of the mud-walled Chan-Chan - the ancient capital of Chimu. During its heyday (15th century), Chan Chan was one of the largest cities in the Americas and the heart of an empire that stretched 500 kilometers along the coast of present-day Peru.
Those childhood experiences inspired Prieto to become an archaeologist, and, having begun work on his dissertation at Yale University, he returned to his hometown to excavate a temple built 3.5 thousand years ago.
And in 2011, the owner of a local pizzeria shared the surprising news: his children - and local dogs - began to find human bones sticking out of the sand in a nearby vacant lot. He asked the archaeologist to find out what was the matter.
At first, Prieto thought it was just a forgotten cemetery. But, having unearthed the remains of several children wrapped in shrouds, and having obtained their radiocarbon dates - 1400-1450 - the archaeologist realized that he had stumbled upon a large-scale and terrible burial.
The remains of two children - perhaps a boy and a girl - rest side by side in a mass grave on an arid coast in northern Peru. These are just two of the 269 children sacrificed. Most of the victims were killed by dissection of the chest - perhaps to extract the heart, - and buried in simple shrouds.
Prieto noted that the graves were not typical for the Chimu culture: children were buried in unusual positions - lying on their backs or crumpled on their side, and not in a sitting position, as was customary among Chimu. In addition, instead of ornaments, ceramics and other burial items known to archaeologists from similar burials, skeletons of young lamas rested nearby. (An important source of meat and wool, as well as a reliable means of transporting goods, these Andean camels were highly prized by the Chimu people.) Finally, there was another strange circumstance: the remains of many children and lamas showed clear traces of cut wounds on the sternum and ribs.
To unravel these mysteries, Prieto called on John Verano, an anthropologist and forensic expert at Tulane University in New Orleans. Verano has long researched the physical evidence of ritual cults in the Andes - for example, he studied how two hundred men and boys were slaughtered in the 13th century in Punta Lobos.
After examining the remains from Huanchachito, Verano confirmed that children and animals were deliberately sacrificed in the same way - a transverse incision of the sternum, which was probably followed by extraction of the heart. Most of all he was struck by the similarity in the location of the wounds, as well as the absence on the bones of traces of uncertain incisions - a kind of "knife test". “This is a ritual murder, and a very deliberate one,” he delivered the verdict.
Not far from Huylillas in the northern highlands of Peru, 14-year-old Danila hugs an alpaca cub to her chest. As the study showed, children of the same age or younger from different parts of the empire, including mountainous regions, were sacrificed to the Chimu gods.
But resurrecting the events in Huanchakito is not so easy, mainly because scientists know very little about the culture of Chimu. But they could be the rulers of a mighty empire, of which few have heard. Its trace in history is lost between two civilizations, much better preserved in the memory of descendants. The first is the Moche culture, whose amazing wall paintings depict the bloody sacrifice of prisoners of war.
The second is the Incas, who crushed the Chimu around 1470, when the Spanish conquerors were just over 60 years away from conquering their own empire.
Chimu was not left with written monuments: our meager knowledge about them is based on archaeological finds and on Spanish chronicles. True, these sources mention that hundreds of Inca children were sacrificed on the occasion of the accession or death of the ruler (although archaeologists have not yet found evidence of this), but there is not a single hint that child sacrifices were made to the chimu on the same scale. “We didn't even know that the Chimu performed such rituals,” Verano admits, referring to the unprecedented number of victims. "The archaeologists are lucky."
Archeology students from the National University of Trujillo prepare to cleanse and catalog the skulls from the Huanchachito mass grave. The arid climate of northern Peru has contributed to the natural mummification of many of the remains; they are unusually well preserved.
Light on the secret of Huanchikito sheds … the hardened silt in which the victims were buried. Heavy layers of silt indicate prolonged heavy rains. “On the arid coast of northern Peru, only El Niño usually brings such rainfall,” explains Prieto.
Chan Chan's population fed on well-functioning irrigation systems and coastal fisheries, but the rise in sea water temperature and heavy rainfall due to this climatic phenomenon could shake both the political and economic foundations of the Chimu empire. Perhaps the priests and leaders decided to make a mass sacrifice in a desperate attempt to plead with the gods to stop the flood and lack of food.
“So many children, so many animals - it could be a very valuable offering to the gods on behalf of the state,” says Prieto.
Jane Eva Baxter, an anthropologist at de Paul University in Chicago who studies the history of children and childhood, supports the hypothesis that, in the eyes of Chimu, children could be one of the most valuable gifts that could be given to the gods. “But that means sacrificing your future,” she muses. "All the energy and strength that went into the continuation of the race and the preservation of society - all this perishes along with the child, given to the slaughter."
Perhaps the sacrifice reflects a new system of ideas of the pre-Columbian peoples of northern Peru about how to gain the favor of higher powers. As Hagen Klaus, an anthropologist at George Mason University in Virginia, notes, child sacrifices became common in the region after the fall of urine in the 9th century. The moche themselves sacrificed many prisoners of war in their temple of the Moon - only a few kilometers separated it from the heart of the Chimu empire in Chan-Chan (though several centuries).
“With the fall of urine, these beliefs became obsolete and rituals lost their power,” says Klaus. “However, they apparently contained something much more, which the inhabitants of Chiang Chan also believed in. Sacrifices are very meticulously built forms of communication with the other world. So the chimu, they believed, interacted with space."
It may be that the pacification of the spirits and the cessation of the rain could not be delayed, but nevertheless the mass sacrifice was carefully thought out. Young lamas - another valuable resource - may have been selected for this particular event from the state herd. Nicholas Göpfert, a camel specialist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, studied the well-preserved fur of four-legged victims and suggested that the chimu were selected for the ceremony by age and color. So, in burials, dark brown llamas often coexist with light brown ones, but there are no white or black animals.
“We know from the Spanish chronicles that the Incas had a color code for sacrificial lamas,” says Goepfert. "Maybe the chimu were selected in a similar way."
The hoofprints of young llamas are imprinted in the deep silt around the grave of a sacrificed child in Huanchachito. Signs of torrential rains on the dry coast have led scientists to speculate that the mass sacrifice of children may have been a reaction of desperate adults to the prolonged rains caused by El Niño.
How the selection of children who faced such a terrible fate remains a mystery: in Huanchakito, boys and girls were killed, they were well taken care of: the remains practically do not bear signs of malnutrition or disease. Based on the results of isotopic analysis of the teeth, they were natives of different parts of the vast Chimu empire. The unnaturally elongated shape of some of the skulls is indicative of deliberate head manipulation in infancy, practiced only in remote mountainous areas.
But many questions remain unanswered. What strata of society did these children belong to? It is difficult to say without the grave goods. They were given away voluntarily in the face of impending disaster - or were they taken forcibly? Archaeologists are at a loss to guess. According to some signs and the results of a forensic medical examination, specialists are trying to restore the course of events.
The drawing of traces preserved on the hardened silt testifies to the fact that a solemn procession was moving to the place of sacrifices. The prints of small, bare feet, as well as the hooves of four-legged animals that were dragged against their will, led Prieto and Verano to assume that the victims were led to the graves, where they were killed.
Perhaps this gruesome mission fell on the shoulders of two adult women, who were then killed with blows to the head and buried in the northern part of the cemetery. The remains of an adult man were also found nearby, lying on his back under a pile of stones. His unusually sturdy physique led archaeologists to believe that this could be the executioner himself.
Did the precious sacrifice help stop the torrential rains? God knows, but this grim event allows us to envision the final, desperate years of a dying empire.
“They could have lost everything and were willing to give up what was dear,” says Baxter. "These sacrifices highlight the Chimu's plight during their difficult years."
In a few decades, the Inca troops will approach the walls of Chan-Chan …
Rare images of the Chimu Pantheon adorn fabrics found in the burials of the nobility in Pampa la Cruz.
Carved wooden figures - stylized images of people or gods, but surprisingly few artifacts were found in children's graves.
A figure with a bowl in hand may be offering a chicha - corn beer.
Chicha - corn beer - cooked in vessels such as this one excavated at Huanchakito.
A few months after the completion of excavations in Huanchachito, news comes from Prieto: he discovered new ritual burials of children and lamas in the town of Pampa la Cruz, on a high hill crowned with a large wooden cross (hence the name: the cross was put more than a century ago by a fisherman in gratitude for rescue at sea).
A little further south on the coast, a new monument rises to commemorate the sacrifices made to the gods at Huanchakito: a statue of a little boy and a lama surrounded by newly planted palm trees, one for each human sacrifice. From the summit of Pampa la Cruz, there is a wonderful view to the west, where the sea is lapping. I arrived in the middle of the Peruvian winter and saw a few brave surfers storming the icy waves. Prieto unearthed the remains of 132 more Chimu children, most of whom were also killed by transverse chest dissection. To date, the list of victims found in two graves is as follows: 269 children, three adults and 466 lamas.
Copper knife found in Pampa la Cruz - unique product: it is equipped with a ratchet that made a sound when the blade cut through the victim's chest.
The middle part of the child's disintegrated sternum was neatly cut in half, indicating a deliberate, ritualistic murder.
There is another mystery: nine burials on a hilltop, among the ruins of an earlier sanctuary of the Moche era, facing the sea. The chimu children also rest here, but they are buried in vestments and fancy headdresses decorated with parrot feathers and carved wooden ornaments. All of the victims are missing a cut mark on the chest, but one has a badly damaged skull - probably by a fatal blow to the head.
During the week I spent digging, Prieto was fortunate enough to bring out a huge copper knife with a ratchet at one end - so far no archaeologist has found anything like it. “Lord, what is this? He exclaims. "Is it really the same knife that killed children?"
One day at lunch, Prieto recounts an ancient tradition that paints chima in a more attractive light. The chronicles tell about an event that happened after the arrival of the Incas and Spaniards: Don Antonio Jaguar, the leader of the besieged Chimu, showed the Spanish conquerors a cache of priceless treasures. There is a legend in Huanchaco that Don Antonio brought them to the peje chico - a smaller treasure - and the peje grande has not yet been found. “I would like to think that these children are peje grande, that for the chimu it was the greatest treasure,” Prieto says thoughtfully.
Text: Christine Romy Photos: Robert Clarke