Child mummies 'fattened up' before

Inca sacrifice

Doncella's death revealed ... a scientist examines the Llullaillaco

Maiden
Maev Kennedy
Tuesday 2 October 2007 10.57 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 13
January 201613.01 GMT

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The girl is slumped like a stoned teenager in a doorway, head drooping,
hands folded in her lap: she has been dead for more than 500 years,
and a team of international archaeologists and scientists, led by Dr

Andy Wilson of Bradford University, has just pieced together the

appalling last months of her life.
Like other children found on some of the highest peaks of the Andes,
the mummy nicknamed the Llullaillaco Maiden had literally been
fattened up for death, fed a much better diet in her last year including
maize and meat, the luxury foods of aristocrats.
Her fine woven dress and cape are also far from the coarse peasant
dress she probably wore before a horrific honour was bestowed on her:
she was chosen to be abandoned on a mountain top, a living sacrifice to
the gods.
She may indeed, the archaeologists hope, have been stupefied with
drugs and alcohol. In her last weeks she was drugged with coca, and
probably maize beer - perhaps to bring on merciful oblivion, possibly
more pragmatically to combat altitude sickness so she could climb
6,739m to her own death, after walking hundreds of miles from the
Inca capital, Cuzco.
The Maiden, aged about 15, whose mummy goes on display this week
at a museum in Salta, Argentina, is regarded as one of the most perfect
naturally mummified figures from anywhere in the world. She was
found in 1999 in a stone shrine on the summit of the volcano, on the
borders of Argentina and Chile.
Nearby were two other children, Lightning Girl, aged about 6, whose
body was scorched by a direct lightning strike some time after her
death, and Llullaillaco Boy, perhaps the most pathetic victim. If the
girls were drugged beyond caring, the seven-year-old clearly was not:
his clothes were covered with vomit and faeces, evidence, the scientists
believe, of his terror. He probably actually died of crushing, so tightly
bound that the cloth dislocated his ribs and pelvis.
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The precise cause of the other deaths remains uncertain: the bitter cold
which preserved their bodies is the most likely explanation. The
scientists, many with children of their own, struggled to maintain
objectivity. "The mummies were so extraordinarily preserved, it was

impossible not to feel fully engaged with them as human beings," Dr

Wilson said. "It felt almost as if the individuals were recounting their
stories themselves, that was what was so chilling about it."
The team believes the food, the clothes, the jewellery, the expensive
pottery left with them, were all intended to raise the status of the
children, possibly to make them a more acceptable offering, but
possibly more pragmatically so that the Inca rulers could use snatched
peasant children, sparing their own. Their deaths were the climax of a
complex ritual lasting at least a year, when they were almost certainly
brought to Cuzco - the source of the pottery found with them - and then
walked enormous distances to the mountains, which must have taken
months.
Their hair was cut, and the cut hair carefully placed in small cloth bags
with them - analysis of isotopes in hair samples provided the most
telling evidence for their short lives - and the girls' elaborately braided
soon before death. As if he hadn't endured enough torment, the little
boy's was full of nits.
Their deaths were terrifying, and Dr Wilson believes they were meant
to be. "The logistics of getting the children there needed imperial
organisation," he said. "We believe there was some measure of the
Incas demonstrating their power to the colonised: obey, or this is what
will happen to you."