The Chimu And The Incas

In the Twenty-first Century United States, what happened at Las Llamas under the Chimu empire is incomprehensible. 

Except it’s not!

Maybe a few dozen Americans have ever heard of the pre-Inca civilization that once controlled a 600-mile-long territory along the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the modern Peru-Ecuador border to Lima.

While impressive, they were eventually overshadowed by the Incas who, despite never numbering more than an estimated 100,000, established the largest native empire in the New World – stretching 2,500 miles from southern Colombia to central Chile and across some of the world’s most mountainous and difficult territories. The Incas created 26,000 miles of roads, ruled an empire of 10 million and imposed their language and culture along the Andean range. Exceptional administrators, they borrowed advancements in metallurgy, warfare, agriculture, animal husbandry and astronomy from the people they conquered. 

And they practiced ritual human sacrifice. But never to the extent that it was perfected by the Chimu at Las Llamas. 

We’ve long known that the pre-Columbian Aztecs, Mayas and Incas practice human sacrifice, but what happened on the wind-swept bluff of Las Llamas just 1,000 feet from the Pacific Ocean was unprecedented in the Americas – if not the entire world. 

In 2011, a team led by archaeologist and native of the Huanchaco-Las Llamas area Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and physical anthropologist John Verano of Tulane University discovered the remains of forty-two children and seventy-six llamas. By 2016, more than 140 sets of child remains and 200 juvenile llamas had been discovered at the site. Rope and textiles found in the burial sites were radiocarbon dated to 1400-1450 AD - roughly one-hundred years before conquistador Francisco Pizarro ordered the execution Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor.

[As a ransom, Atahualpa, captured by the Spanish in a deceit-filled ploy, agreed to fill a room roughly twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide to a height of almost nine feet with 13,000 pounds of gold and twice as much silver, approximately $1.5 billion - according to the Guinness Book of Records, the highest ransom ever.  Sentenced to death by burning for paganism and the murder of his brother and believing that burning a body prevented it from entering the afterlife, Atahualpa converted to Catholicism – in exchange for death by strangulation with a garrote.]

The Prieto and Verano team discovered the skeletal remains of both children and animals showed evidence of cuts to the sternum as well as rib dislocations, suggesting the victims’ chests were cut open and pulled apart, perhaps to facilitate the removal of the heart. 

Both children and animals were killed with consistent, efficient, transverse cuts across the sternum. There were no indications of hesitancy – “false cuts,” indicating that the deaths were inflicted by one or more trained hands. “It is ritual killing, and it’s very systematic,” observed Verano.

The remains of an adult man and two adult women found nearby showed signs of blunt-force trauma to the head, indicating they may have played a role in the sacrificial events and were dispatched shortly thereafter. 

In findings frighteningly prescient for the modern-day U.S., the sacrificed children ranged in age from about five to fourteen years old, with the majority between the ages of eight and twelve and most were buried facing west – out to sea. 

Based on the layers of mud that covered the remains, investigators believe the children and animals were killed in a single ritualistic event. And scientific evidence has caused the archaeologists to believe this may have been the largest single mass sacrifice event in world history with more than three times the forty-two children sacrificed at the Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan – modern-day Mexico City.

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

Drawing clues from the layers of mud found during the excavation of the skeletons, researchers have suggested the rituals may have been a desperate respond to severe rain and flooding on the normally arid Pacific coastline and they were probably associated with climate related events associated with El-Nino weather phenomena, which would have elevated sea temperatures and disrupted marine fisheries and overwhelmed the Chimu’s extensive infrastructure of agricultural canals.

The Chimus were not the only culture marked by child sacrifice. George Mason University professor of anthropology Haagen Klaus has found evidence of child sacrifice in the Lambayeque Valley north of Lima, a land of ancient kingdoms pyramids and vast forests. He has suggested that ancient societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have resorted to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults was not enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Nino. He explained:

“People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them. 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… 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.”

In reflecting on the ritualistic sacrifices of children and llamas discovered in recent years across Latin America, Prieto noted, “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… This just may be the tip of the iceberg.”

Like the Chimu sacrifices of Las Llamas, Inca ritual child sacrifices – called capacocha – were apparently purposeful - to protect the empire against famine, drought, or disease; however, children represented all regions of the empire. Boys were generally younger than ten years old and girls could be as old as sixteen, but they had to be virgins. Potential victims received special treatment – including food normally reserved for nobles and children too young to eat on their own were breastfed by their mothers. After elaborate rituals honoring the four Inca gods – the Creator, the Sun God, the Moon God, and the Thunder God – children and priests were sent to the four administrative regions of the Inca Empire

On the day of the sacrifice, the children were essentially narcotized with a sizeable amount of coca leaves and chica, an alcoholic drink prepared by fermenting corn – rendering sacrificial victims compliant or even unconscious so that the killing went smoothly. They were sacrificed by a powerful blow to the head or left to freeze to death.

Human nature would not allow them to kill their own children… if they did not expect some reward for what they were doing or if they did not believe that they were sending their children to a better place. 
Spanish Jesuit missioner to Peru Bernabe Cobo (1582 – 1657)

The priests and friars who accompanied Spanish conquistadores to Peru and Mexico oversaw the destruction of the Inca and Aztec temples at which ritual sacrifice was practiced, building churches and monasteries atop substantially more solid Inca and Aztec foundations.

The earliest books of the Hebrew scriptures/Old Testament are replete with accounts of Israel’s battles against the Canaanites and the complete – and we do mean complete – destruction of Canaanite cities – burning them to the ground and slaughtering every man, woman and child. 

While the relative absence of archeological indicators of Canaanite ritualized child sacrifice in any biblical territories might be read as exonerating those who worshipped Baal and making the Israelite conquerors appear to be blood-thirsty invaders, evidence from Canaanite colonies along the North African Mediterranean coast put the lie to those impressions.  Fourth Century B.C.E. Greek historian Cleitarchus and Third Century historian Diodorus Siculus both provide thorough descriptions of child sacrifice among Canaanite refugees in Carthage – modern day Tunisia. And since 1921, archeologists have unearthed hundreds of clay pots containing the cremains of infants. One site contains the remains of approximately 20,000 infants in urns. And inscriptions found on urns make clear that these were sacrifices to Baal Hammon (the creator of the universe, king of the gods, universal god of fertility, god of rain and the storm god) and his consort Tanit because they had “heard my voice and blessed me.” 

The theological argument can well be made that the Israelites annihilated Canaanite cities – including every man, woman and child – in order to obliterate ritual child sacrifice from the face of their known world. 

Well more than two millennia after the Canaanites burned some of their infants as offerings to Baal, six hundred years after the Chimu slaughtered hundreds of children to satisfy their gods and the weather, the slaughter of children continues in the United States:f 

“…[W]hat I did find was something no prayer will ever relieve… Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, over and over again, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them… I could only hope these two bodies were the tragic exception to the list of survivors. But as I waited there with my fellow Uvalde doctors, nurses, first responders and hospital staff for the other casualties we hoped to save, they NEVER arrived. All that remained was the bodies of 17 more children and the two teachers who cared so much for them, who dedicated their careers to nurturing and respecting the awesome potential of every single one….

“[T]wo children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been [so] ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-splattered cartoon clothes still cling to them….”
Dr. Roy Guerrero, the only pediatrician in Uvalde, Texas on
May 24, 2022

“We [he and his wife, Camila] also met a cosmetologist. All right? She was well versed in mortuary makeup. That’s the task of making the victims appear as peaceful and natural as possible for their open-casket viewings.

“These bodies were very different. They needed much more than makeup to be presentable. They needed extensive restoration. Why? Due to the exceptionally large exit wounds of an AR-15 rifle. Most of the bodies so mutilated that only DNA tests or green Converse could identify them.  Many children were left not only dead, but hollow….”
Uvalde native and actor Matthew McConaughey 
in the White House Briefing Room, June 7, 2022

When this is posted, in the Year of Our Lord 2022, more than seven-hundred and thirty American children will already have died in gun-related shootings – more than five times the number of children sacrificed on that fateful day at Chimu. 

All praise to today’s Baal - the gods of assault rifles, high-capacity cartridges, armor -piercing bullets, and gun manufacturers. 

Because everyone knows “Guns don’t kill children; cowardly politicians just let it happen and then speak about their empty ‘thoughts and prayers,’” maybe those same gutless politicians will remember the words of a rabbi two-thousand years ago:

“Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather…” 
Luke 17:37