A Society's Sacrifice
Why the Chimú people of ancient Peru offered what was most valuable to them
Originally Published January/February 2012
Each year the technology used by archaeologists to locate sites becomes more sophisticated. Satellite images, Google Earth, and ground-penetrating radar are now combined with more traditional methods such as surface surveys and test trenches to determine how and where archaeologists will excavate. But sometimes one of the best sources of information about an area—and one that is frequently overlooked—is the knowledge of the local people who live there and whose families have been there for generations. Such is the case with a site in the small Peruvian coastal town of Huanchaquito that has come to be referred to by the locals as Las Llamas—The Llamas. It is a site that has a great deal to tell about the Andean Chimú culture and their religious and sacrificial practices.
Archaeologist Oscar Gabriel Prieto grew up in the town of Huanchaco, next to Huanchaquito. There, from the time that he was six years old, he would walk around sites in the area. He recently returned to excavate Pampas Gramalote, a small fishing village dating to between 2000 and 1200 B.C. While working there one day in August 2011, Prieto was approached by a resident of Huanchaquito who asked him if he was an archaeologist. When Prieto answered yes, the man said, “Then you have to come with me. Only 300 yards from here, there is another area filled with human bones, including skulls. I know these things are important.”
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Together they walked to the site and there Prieto saw a number of scattered human skulls and animal bones. No one, save the village’s inhabitants, had ever seen or even known about the site before. Strong Peruvian winter winds had blown away the surface sands and exposed the remains.
After calling the local archaeological officials and enlisting the services of several of his students from Pampas Gramalote, Prieto quickly got to work. In less than five hours, the team had exposed 20 human bodies and the extremely well-preserved remains of 30 camelids, the family that includes llamas and alpacas. “Right away I realized the magnitude of the discovery,” says Prieto. Shortly thereafter, he was able to add to his team a professional illustrator, a zooarchaeologist, and a physical anthropologist, as well as gather the necessary tools—wheelbarrows, cardboard boxes, shovels, a bit of funding from the town, and a tent to cover the site. Over the next two weeks, under the watchful eyes of the inhabitants of Huanchaquito, Prieto excavated a total of 43 human and 76 llama skeletons. He had uncovered the largest human and animal sacrifice ever found in Peru.
Although the finds at Las Llamas are more extensive than those at any other Andean sacrifice ever identified, this type of ritual event is not unique in the heart of Chimú civilization, according to Prieto. In 1968, as part of a large survey project that first studied the area, archaeologist Christopher Donnan uncovered evidence of a similar event next to the colonial-era church of Huanchaco. There he found 17 children and 20 llamas and concluded that they had been deliberately sacrificed and buried together as part of a Chimú religious ritual. According to Prieto, both children and animals had been part of ritual offerings since the very beginnings of complex societies in the Central Andes. Although at Las Llamas Prieto has found only camelids, at many other sites archaeologists have found remains of parrots, sea birds, monkeys, guinea pigs, and dogs. However, the scale of the Las Llamas find suggests to Prieto that the sacrifice was done for some extraordinary purpose.
Prieto is in the process of creating a digital site map of the orientation, disposition, and distribution of the children and llamas in order to understand how the sacrifice was organized. For example, some children were buried together with llamas, some with the llamas on top, and some with the llamas underneath. In other cases, the llamas were buried separately. Prieto has established that the burials were organized along east-west and north-south axes, although the significance of these patterns is not yet clear. In the future, the team will undertake analyses of the childrens’ bones and teeth to determine their gender, what kind of diet they had access to, if they belonged to the same genetic group or even the same family, and if they were local or came here from another region. Prieto would also like to know if the llamas were raised locally, or brought in from another area, and if the camelids are exclusively llamas, or if some might be alpacas. There is little evidence for the presence of alpacas on the Peruvian north coast, and alpacas were considered more valuable than llamas. Specialized tests of the children’s hair will determine whether they were poisoned before they were sacrificed and what type of poison may have been used.
In summer 2012 Prieto’s team will return to Las Llamas to look for more children’s and llamas’ remains. In the meantime, the site is constantly monitored by local guards and the police. And Prieto and his team are always walking around the area to keep it safe from looters and other dangers.
