Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru

Chapter 1: Why Sacrifice?

  Why Sacrifice?  .  Institute of Andean Studies  In the depths of anyone’s cultural heritage, all over the world, there is evidence of sacrifice—human and animal . Mythic supernatural beings were sacrificers and sacrificed. Ritual reenacts myth; human beings imitate what gods and sacred ancestors did.To sacrifice is to make sacred. Ritual may move far away from original myth, but the roots still appear in religious rites that people are familiar with today. The modern world, however, has generally lost the concept of sacredness and the deep meaning of ritual. Few of us believe that our rituals can change anything. In the past, people believed that the world could be coped with and changed through ritual. Today, we try to master it with technology alone. In the ancient Americas, archaeological and skeletal evidence for sacri- fice has been—and is being—found; there are also depictions of sacrifice on ceramics, mural paintings, sculpture, metal, and textiles; and there are written observations from chroniclers at the time of Spanish contact. The Andes belonged to this tradition. JohnVerano (:) notes that various treatments of Andean bones ‘‘include human sacrifice, dedicatory burials, secondary offerings of human remains, and the collection and curation of human body parts.’’ There were also offerings of animals and animal parts. Andean peoples generally believed that things had life, that there was animism in what we call inanimate objects. Objects, therefore, were also a kind of living sacrifice. Cloth, ceramics, metal, feathers, coca leaves, food, and other treasured things were valuable offerings. María Rostworowski (: –) cites seventeenth-century court documents that imply a clear difference between the indigenous Andean concept of the cosmos and the Christian one. An old native man accused of witchcraft testified that the sacred objects of the Spaniards (the figures of saints and the paraphernalia used in the Eucharist) were mute painted and gilded sticks, which did not speak or respond to requests, but the mummy bundles and the sacred objects of the Indians spoke and responded when sacrifices  Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru were made. These were huacas. A huaca (also guaca or waka) was a sacred place or object, or an ancestral mummy. An indigenous witness in a trial against idolatry noted that the Spaniards also had their huacas, but they did not feed them. The feeding of huacas was surely a major motivation for sacri fice in the Andes; although huacas were given other foods, blood was the most valuable nourishment. The Spanish chronicler Bernabé Cobo ( []: –), observing that the different sacrificial rites in Inca times were very varied but also carefully ordered, noted that ‘‘the most authoritative and important sacrifice was . . . human blood, but it . . . was only offered to the major gods and guacas for important purposes and on special occasions.’’    An early example of apparent Andean human sacrifice appears at Aspero, on the desert central coast of Peru, north of Lima, a site with artifacts dating back to  .. and architecture dating to ca. . Robert Feldman (:–;: ) found in a temple there the body of an infant with some five hundred beads around its head, the remains of a special cap or hat. The body was wrapped and placed, with a bundle of textiles beside it, under a finely worked, inverted food-grinding stone, which had traces of red pigment. Probably the most elaborate burial known from the period, it may have been a dedicatory offering for sacred architecture (Burger : ). The site of La Paloma, near the coast south of Lima, was occupied at about the same time (– ..). Jeffrey Quilter (: –, ) found there a number of child burials in houses or special structures. Again, these were the most elaborate burials at the site, and, again, they may have been dedicatory offerings. In the highlands, in the Alto Huallaga (Kotosh Chavín phase, – ..; Onuki : ), two child burials were found under the walls of structures. At Ancón, on the central coast, ca.  .., a child was interred beneath the corner of a semisubterranean stone house (Burger: ).The child’s eyes had been replaced with mica sheets, its stomach supplanted by a gourd, and its heart by a clear rockquartz crystal, a substance with magical qualities. Steve Bourget (this volume ) writes of child sacrifice at the base of a sacred structure at Moche in later times. Vestiges of this practice remain. Today, in highland Bolivia, at the beginning of construction of a village house...