Inka Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship: Strategies for Empire Unification

Introduction

1 _ Introduction This book is concerned with human sacrifice and mountain worship in the Inka Empire of South America. Why am I investigating these practices? After all, most Westerners regard the former with abhorrence,1 especially the ritual killing of a child,2 and consider the latter to be incomprehensible . Just because people today find them revolting and/or unfathomable , however, does not mean that those living in the past did.3 Through the ages, human immolation has been widespread, rites of this type probably having been performed in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.4 Although the practice may once have been extremely important, archaeologists have tended to regard it (at least until relatively recently) as unworthy of examination; the problem has been that many scholars, eager for tenure and concerned about their academic reputations, have thought of it as being too sensational.5 So it begs the question: why am I studying it? If I were a positivist, I could declare that the research is being carried out in the pursuit of knowledge, the worthiest of enterprises. I am not one, though, and reject this answer. The present investigation can be understood by embedding it in its own social/historical context, which includes my personal and professional motives for conducting it. Let us start with my personal reason for looking at immolation. I attended high school in Santiago, Chile’s capital. One Sunday afternoon, being interested in anthropology, I visited the National Museum of Natural History and happened to glance into a refrigerated showcase. What I saw stopped me in my tracks: it was the well-preserved body of a boy. A plaque next to the case explained that the frozen child was a sacrificial victim who five centuries earlier had been entombed by the Cuzqueños near the summit of Cerro El Plomo, a dome of ice and rock located to the northeast of the city. The youngster, curled 2 introduction Map 0.1 The Inka Empire at the height of its power in the early sixteenth century (map by Justin Miller). Introduction 3 up in a fetal position, looked as if he were asleep and might wake at any moment. I was spellbound by him,6 and felt the same “sense of miracle” that was described by the explorer Loren McIntyre when he touched the boy’s cheek and eyelashes.7 I decided then and there that I wanted to do research on human immolation in the Inka state. Regarding my professional motive, Tom Zuidema has written that “the analysis of the capac hucha [qhapaq hucha] ritual [which involved the sacrifice of specially chosen children and young women] may give us one of the most critical instruments for studying pre-Spanish political organization .”8 I agree; an examination of this practice is vital for understanding the strategies that were employed by the lords of Cuzco to legitimate their authority and to maintain control over conquered peoples in the southern part of their realm. In such an investigation, ethnohistoric data must be weighed against archaeological evidence. Like human immolation, mountain worship has been ignored by archaeologists, or at least it was until the 1990s. I have several motives for researching it, though. Being interested in mountaineering, I have climbed El Plomo twice; during my second ascent, I saw the pirca, stone structure, situated at an altitude of 5,400 meters (m), where the body of the boy was discovered in 1954.9 I wondered why the Inkas went through so much trouble to take the child to such an out-of-the-way and hard-to-reach spot in order to put him to death. Could their reason have had something to do with adoration of the pinnacle? My second motive for studying the practice is academic. There is a ubiquitous type of Cuzqueño site (about two hundred of them are known10 ) in Qulla Suyu (the austral-most quarter of the empire), which consists of a stone structure or a pattern of rocks on a peak. If at each of these sites a mountain ceremony took place, then the religious practice was likely of great significance to the ethnic groups living in the southern Andes. And an investigation of it could be crucial to comprehending how the Inkas incorporated said groups into their polity. It has been said that by examining bizarre rites like human immolation and mountain worship, we run...