Inca Child Sacrifices Were Given Drugs Before They Died, Mummies Show

Eight children sacrificed by the Inca on high mountain peaks in South America, around 500 years ago, were given drugs in the weeks and months before they died. Their own hair and fingernails, preserved by the cold, are what revealed it.

The children were found as frozen mummies near volcanic peaks in Peru and Argentina, among them Mount Ampato and Mount Llullaillaco. Because the cold, low-oxygen air kept their bodies almost intact, researchers could test small samples of hair and nails for traces of what the children had taken while they were alive. Hair and nails grow slowly and lock those traces inside them, so they work as a record of the months before death.

Drugs were found in every hair sample tested

The team looked for a range of mind-altering substances, including stimulants, hallucinogens and compounds linked to medicinal plants, in samples from the eight mummies. Cocaine and benzoylecgonine, the substance the body produces when it breaks down cocaine, turned up in all six hair samples that were tested. That fits with the chewing of coca leaves, a practice deeply embedded in Andean culture. Chewing coca leaves can hold off hunger and tiredness, so it may have helped the children cope with the physical demands of a long journey through the mountains.

Two of the children, one from Chuscha and one from Llullaillaco, also showed traces of a compound called cocaethylene. The body makes it only when cocaine and alcohol are present at the same time, which means those children had taken both. The alcohol was probably drunk as chicha, a beer made from maize that played an important role in Inca religious ceremonies.

One girl had taken something from the Amazon

The most striking result came from the nails of a 14-year-old girl known as the Ampato Maiden, or Juanita. Her nails contained harmine, a substance found in several plants, including a vine that grows in the Amazon rainforest and is used to make ayahuasca. Harmine can affect mood. The researchers could not work out exactly which plant the girl had been given, but the same substance had been found before in two other child mummies from Mount Ampato. That raises the possibility that plants from the Amazon were carried up into the Andes for ritual use.

Messengers to the gods

The children died in a ritual called capacocha, one of the most important religious ceremonies of the Inca Empire. It was performed to mark events such as the death or accession of a ruler, major festivals, or to appease the gods in times of natural disaster. Children were chosen from across the empire for qualities such as exceptional beauty and physical purity. They were often taken to the capital, Cusco, for ceremonies, then sent on processions that could take months over difficult terrain to sacred sites, where they were buried with fine textiles, pottery and precious figurines.

Archaeologist Dagmara Socha of the University of Warsaw, one of the researchers, said the children "were considered sacred messengers who would continue to play an important role after death", and that their preparation "may therefore have been intended to help them endure the journey and reach their final destination in the best possible condition".

She said what surprised her most was the diversity of the results: coca use appears to have been common, but the other substances varied a lot from child to child. In her words, this suggests the preparation of children was "much more complex and varied" than previously thought. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity.