Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface  .  &  .  For many people in the modern Western world, making a sacrifice means either giving without receiving or giving up something valuable for a cause that may benefit others. For earlier societies almost everywhere, offerings were made for the greater good. Animals were sacrificed, and many kinds of treasured things were offered. The most valuable offering was human sacrifice, and throughout the world, there has been ritual human sacrifice at some time in history. Blood was the symbol of life, of animation , of nourishment, the most important offering that could be given to the natural and supernatural elements of the world that gave humankind nourishment and allowed survival. The sacrificial nourishing of sacred beings made life possible. At certain stages in cultural development, it was the way that a people thought that its cosmology could be made to work. Understanding sacrifice is an important means of knowing a culture, its worldview, and its religion. The Andes had no known form of indigenous writing, so the evidence for sacrifice and many other activities must come from other sources. The early Spanish chroniclers recorded what had been described to them about life in Inca times; their accounts include frequent references to ‘‘sacrifice’’ and ‘‘offering.’’ Some doubt has been expressed about these accounts, however , for they were influenced by a European, Catholic point of view, and the chroniclers did not ask the right questions about many things that we today would like explained. However, pictorial evidence for sacrifice has long been known. The Incas made little in the way of figurative art, but existing pre-Inca depictions give visual evidence for sacrifice on ceramics and textiles, on wooden and metal objects. Examples of archaeological evidence are now accumulating in the data from recent excavations in a number of places. Most of the archaeological evidence for human sacrifice in the Andes—most clearly among the Inca and the Moche—is very recent. The contributions to this volume cover a range of time from Cupisnique, early in the first millennium .., to the Huari Empire, which collapsed x Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru at the end of the first millennium .., and there are also references to earlier cultures and to the Chimú and Inca empires. Each author addresses the theme of sacrifice in its various forms: images of ritual activities associated with these sacrificial practices, material offerings as sacrifice, and the physical evidence of human and animal sacrifice. This book should serve as a compilation of significant research on sacrifice and related practices. In each article, reference is made to depictions of sacrifice in mural art or on pottery and other media; now, in most cases, the authors can link the images with archaeological remains. With a growing body of knowledge about Andean forms of sacrifice, the authors of this volume begin to unravel the significance of sacrifice in the lives of the peoples studied. An analysis of the role of sacrifice in the Andes has yet to be written; with the research presented here, and with future work, this should be possible. Cupisnique, Chavín, and Pucará sculptures, and later Nasca, Moche, and Huari images on textiles, ceramics, and other media, show supernatural beings holding human heads. The elaborately embroidered garments placed in rich Paracas burials in the south-coast desert depict beings with knives and human heads. Mary Frame explores this iconography on blockdesign , embroidered, mummy-bundle textiles. She describes the figures as engaged in bloodletting activities, including autosacrifice, and interprets the imagery as showing a process that transforms the recent dead to ancestor and animal counterparts. Paracas sacrifice iconography has until now eluded interpretation; this provocative reading opens new avenues for future research. Painted Nasca ceramics portray deities whose bodies are decorated with detached heads. Donald Proulx indicates that, although ‘‘trophy’’ heads are found or depicted in many Andean cultures, the south-coast Paracas and Nasca peoples are the only known societies to have meticulously prepared severed heads. He reviews the evidence and suggests that warfare was endemic and that the Nasca practice of head-taking and the use of severed heads had ritual significance beyond that of war trophies, a situation in distinct contrast to the practices of the north-coast Cupisnique (CordyCollins , ‘‘Decapitation,’’ this volume) and the Moche (Cordy-Collins, Bourget , and Verano, this volume). The depiction...