Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice in Peru May Be World’s Largest

Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice
in the Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on
Peru’s northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.

More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been
ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago
on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow
of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.

While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec^[1], Maya^[2], and Inca have been
recorded in colonial-era Spanish chronicles and documented in
modern scientific excavations, the discovery of a large-scale child
sacrifice event in the little-known pre-Columbian Chimú
civilization is unprecedented in the Americas—if not in the entire
world.

“I, for one, never expected it,” says Verano, a physical
anthropologist who has worked in the region for more than three
decades. “And I don’t think anyone else would have, either.”

The researchers are in the process of submitting a report on
scientific results of the discovery to a peer-reviewed, scientific
journal.

The sacrifice site, formally known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas,
is located on a low bluff just a thousand feet from the sea, amid a
growing spread of cinderblock residential compounds in Peru’s
northern Huanchaco district. Less than half a mile to the east of
the site is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Chan Chan^[3], the ancient Chimú
administrative center, and beyond its walls, the modern provincial
capital of Trujillo.

At its peak, the Chimú Empire controlled a 600-mile-long
territory along the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the
modern Peru-Ecuador border to Lima.

Only the Inca^[4]
commanded a larger empire than the Chimú in pre-Columbian South
America, and superior Inca forces put an end to the Chimú Empire
around A.D. 1475.

Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (generally referred to by the
researchers as “Las Llamas,”) first made headlines^[5]
in 2011, when the remains of 42 children and 76 llamas were found
during an emergency dig directed by study co-author Prieto. An
archaeologist and Huanchaco native, Prieto was excavating a
3,500-year-old temple down the road from the sacrifice site when
local residents first alerted him to human remains eroding from
nearby coastal dunes.

By the time excavations concluded at Las Llamas in 2016, more
than 140 sets of child remains and 200 juvenile llamas had been
discovered at the site; rope and textiles found in the burials are
radiocarbon dated to between 1400 and 1450.

The skeletal remains of both children and animals show evidence
of cuts to the sternum as well as rib dislocations, which suggest
that the victims’ chests were cut open and pulled apart, perhaps to
facilitate the removal of the heart.

The remains of three adults—a man and two women—were found in
close proximity of the children and animals. Signs of blunt-force
trauma to the head and a lack of grave goods with the adult bodies
lead researchers to suspect that they may have played a role in the
sacrifice event and were dispatched shortly thereafter.

The 140 sacrificed children ranged in age from about five to 14,
with the majority between the ages of eight and 12; most were
buried facing west, out to the sea. The llamas were less than 18
months old and generally interred facing east, toward the high
peaks of the Andes.

The investigators believe all of the human and animal victims
were ritually killed in a single event, based on evidence from a
dried mud layer found in the eastern, least disturbed part of the
7,500-square-foot site. They believe the mud layer once covered the
entire sandy dune where the ritual took place, and it was disturbed
during the preparation of the burial pits and the subsequent
sacrifice event.

Archaeologists discovered the footprints of sandaled adults,
dogs, barefoot children, and young llamas preserved in the mud
layer, with deep skid marks illustrating where reluctant
four-legged offerings may have been forcibly coaxed to their
end.

An analysis of the footprints may also enable the archaeologists
to reconstruct the ritual procession: It appears that a group of
children and llamas was led to the site from the north and the
south edges of the bluff, meeting in the center of the site, where
they would have been sacrificed and buried. The bodies of a few
children and animals were simply left in the wet mud.

If the archaeologists’ conclusion is correct, Huanchaquito-Las
Llamas may be compelling scientific evidence for the largest single
mass child sacrifice event known in world history.

Until now, the largest mass child sacrifice event for which we
have physical evidence is the ritual murder and interment of 42
children at Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán
(modern-day Mexico City).

Outside of the Americas, archaeologists at sites such as the
ancient Phoenician city of Carthage debate^[6]
whether child remains found there constitute ritual sacrifice and,
if so, if such ritual events took place over the course of decades
or even centuries.

Verano emphasizes that such clear-cut evidence for deliberate,
singular mass sacrificial events such as those evidenced at Las
Llamas, however, is extremely rare to find in archaeological
contexts.

Analysis of the remains from Las Llamas shows that both children
and llamas were killed with consistent, efficient, transverse cuts
across the sternum. A lack of hesitant (“false start”) cuts
indicates that they were made by one or more trained hands.

“It is ritual killing, and it’s very systematic,” Verano
says.

Human sacrifice has been practiced in nearly all corners of the
globe at various times, and scientists believe that the ritual may
have played an important role in the development of complex
societies^[7] through social
stratification and control of populations by elite social
classes.

Most societal models that look at human sacrifice, however, are
based on the ritual killing of adults, says Joseph Watts^[8], a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute
for the Science of Human History.

“I think it’s definitely harder to explain child sacrifice,” he
says, then pauses.

“Also, at a personal level.”

The mass sacrifice of only children and young llamas that took
place at Las Llamas, however, appears to be a phenomenon previously
unknown in the archaeological record, and it immediately raises the
question: What would motivate the Chimú to commit such an act?

Prieto concedes that this is often the first question he
encounters when he shares his research at Las Llamas with
scientific colleagues and the local community.

“When people hear about what happened and the scale of it, the
first thing they always ask is why.”

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue,
say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain
and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably
associated with a climate event related to El-Niño^[9].

Elevated sea temperatures characteristic of El Niño would have
disrupted marine fisheries in the area, while coastal flooding
could have overwhelmed the Chimú’s extensive infrastructure of
agricultural canals.

The Chimú succumbed to the Inca only decades after the
sacrifices at Las Llamas.

Haagen
Klaus^[10], a professor of
anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the
earliest evidence for child
sacrifice^[11] in the region, at the
10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque
Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a
member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the
northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of
children when the sacrifice of adults wasn’t enough to fend off the
repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

“People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to
them,” he explains. “They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was
ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a
new type of sacrificial victim.”

“It’s impossible to know without a time machine,” Klaus says,
adding that the Las Llamas discovery is important in that it adds
to our knowledge about ritual violence and variations on human
sacrifice in the Andes.

“There’s this idea that ritual killing is contractual, that it’s
performed to get something from supernatural deities. But it’s
actually a much more complicated attempt at negotiation with those
supernatural forces and their manipulation by the living.”

The scientific team investigating the Las Llamas sacrifices is
now undertaking the painstaking work of unraveling the life
histories of the victims—such as who they were and where they may
have come from.

Although it is difficult to determine sex based on skeletal
remains at such a young age, preliminary DNA analysis indicates
that both boys and girls were victims, and isotopic analysis^[12] indicates that they
were not all drawn from local populations but likely came from
different ethnic groups and regions of the Chimú Empire.

Evidence for cranial modification^[13], practiced in some
highland areas at the time, also supports the idea that children
were brought to the coast from farther-flung areas of Chimú
influence.

Since the discovery at Las Llamas, the research team has
discovered archaeological evidence around Huanchaco for similar,
contemporaneous mass child-llama sacrifice sites, which are the
subject of ongoing scientific investigation with the support of the
National Geographic Society.

“Las Llamas is already such a unique site in the world, and it
makes you wonder how many other sites like this there may be out
there in the area for future research,” says Prieto.

“This just may be the tip of the iceberg.”