History's largest child sacrifice was a response to devastating weather, archaeologists say

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

History’s largest child sacrifice was a response to devastating weather, archaeologists say

By Ben Guarino March 6 at 2:00 PM

Archaeologists working in Peru have found what they say is the site of the largest known child sacrifice in the world. About 140 children and more than 200 animals, probably llamas, were killed in the middle of the 1400s. A civilization known as the Chimú sacrificed the children in response to catastrophic weather, the scientists suggest. An unusual layer of thick mud, a sign of an extreme El Niño event, covered the burial pits.

The children’s bodies were buried on the skirt of a bluff that, six centuries ago, overlooked the Pacific. It now overlooks the ocean and a housing development. Gabriel Prieto, an archaeologist at the National University of Trujillo, was working nearby when the owner of a pizza restaurant told him construction workers had uncovered an “unusual concentration of human remains” in a dune.

The number of human skulls that emerged from the sand stunned Prieto. They were in an “excellent state of preservation,” he said.

The site was less than a kilometer — about a 15-minute walk — from the ancient Chimú metropolis of Chan Chan, the largest city in pre-Columbian South America. That the Chimú sacrificed children here, and in such numbers, came as a surprise to researchers. Archaeologists knew the Inca people, who conquered the Chimú at the end of the 15th century, killed children in mountaintop rituals. But before this research, no similar accounts existed for the Chimú.

"It is an unknown chapter that we can add to the big book on ancient sacrifice in world societies,” said John Verano, an archaeologist at Tulane University, who, with Prieto and their colleagues, is an author of a PLOS One study published Wednesday. The sacrificial site, covering 7,500 square feet, is named Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, after a nearby coastal town and the llamas.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/06/historys-largest-child-sacrifice-was-response-devastating-weather-archaeologists-say/

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Related: A mass sacrifice of children and camelids at the Huanchaquito-Las Llamas site, Moche Valley, Peru (PLOS One)

[exboyfil]

1. We must understand their culture

and sympathize with ----


What. They were evil fucks. If it was important to sacrifice somebody, then grab that fat priest and knock him over the head.