Remains of 250 sacrificed children found in Peru

Did they die from having their skulls crushed by those gigantic hats?

[quote] The Gods demand the souls of yet more autistic children!

Peru is crazy -- so many different ancient civilizations clustered around there. You could take a whole year just to visit all of their various ruins.

Peru is crazy -- so many different ancient civilizations clustered around there. You could take a whole year just to visit all of their various ruins.

Are there any five-star hotels nearby? I don’t usually go for dirty old ruins, but this I want to see!

Notice ancient dead bodies always died violently - volcanic eruption, murder, execution, human sacrifice. They never find a gravesite filled with children who died of disease outbreaks. I mean, for all we know it may have been customary to cut the heart out of any old dead person so it could be eaten or burned because it was considered the soul or something. Maybe they all died of strep throat or diphtheria and it was the custom of the time to cut everyone open after death to allow the soul to escape.

I remember reading about the bog mummies in Europe and the claim that they were criminals who were executed and thrown in a bog or were human sacrifices. How do we know they were ancient drunks who got tangled up in vines or something and fell into the bog

^Debbie Downer

Unusual discoveries are constantly being unearthed in Peru.

Under the Incas the children of the elite were often sacrificed. An Andean Ivanka would have been knocked out and left to die of exposure on a mountain top as a sacrifice, an honor to her family.

R9, lol -- if only that policy were still in place!

I love Datalounge!

There's a History Channel documentary on child sacrifice throughout history and Scandinavia topped the European charts on rituals and documented evidence of well established and socially accepted practice of child sacrifice. It's very interesting.

Interesting? I’m wet. Do you have a title?

Did Hillary time travel back to commit those child sacrifices in Baphomet's name?

Or did Baphomet grant her immortality thousands of years ago as she began creating the Deep State?

I watched on Youtube, I'm trying to search my bookmarks, but it was either by History, Discovery or Natgeo. It was a documentary exclusively focused on European human sacrifice.

Yes, clearly something powerful is working on Hillary's side.

She lost.

Pizzaro was able to stop this barbaric practice.

Well, they also eat guinea pigs in Peru, so go figure.

It wasn't an Youtube doc made by conspiracy theorists but a very mainstream documentary with historians mapping human sacrifice in Europe.

Dataloungers would NEVER sacrifice a child to pagan Gods!

They'd assume the Gods in their unearthly home wouln't want children around any more than they do.

Well? Did it work?

Actually that sounds appealing r3. I wish I could just take a year off like that.

Were they really sacrificed, or did they just not know that kicking the seat in front of them is incredibly rude.

R22, if you ever get a chance, visit Peru! I was lucky enough to have visited for months in college. It's one of the cradles of civilization and [along with Mesoamerica] was one of the most advanced regions of the Americas. Of all the countries I've ever visited, it might be my favorite.

How many times do you think Poo Shoes has masturbated to this story already?

Did they grow crops on those terraces or were the cheaper houses of the subjects located there? Like working class suburbs.

So funny that Western Europe adopted the middle eastern goat as a symbol of evil. Middle Easterners raised goats because they can survive on sparse vegetation. Western Europe was more verdant and forested and wasn’t much interested in keeping goats. Cows, deer, sheep, chickens and geese were more likely to be kept as livestock.

Do they mention chickens in the Bible? I remember goats, sheep, jackals, lions, doves being mentioned in the Bible, but did i they mention chickens? Seems like middle easterners weren’t chicken fanciers in ancient times

When I said deer were kept as livestock I meant in estates of the wealthy. They had parks stocked with deer. And boar hunting was a thing. Europeans disint have a horror of pig meat.

Say what you want of the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations but they actually put a stop to all human sacrifice and polygamy too. The Egyptians I believe didn't practice human sacrifice.

R26, the terraces were for agriculture. Living along the steep, craggly Andes, the Inca lacked level fields for farming, so they created this terraced agricultural system, which gave their crops the optimal success rate. A system of cisterns and water canals helped irrigate the crops.

Much like US today, the wealthy nobility lived at high mountaintop citadels close to the sky (with a killer view) and the peasants lived at lower flatlands. The opposite is true of Latin America today: the rich live in expensive, exclusive, flat city centers, and the poor are in sprawling shanty hillsides.

Well they did go in for exposing babies with deformities of any kind, r29. Not exactly sacrifice, but maybe even nastier. Not even asking the Gods for anything, just hey, this kid sucks, kill it.

r31, what's wrong with that, you anti-choice frau?

Not all the Greeks did that, I think it was in Sparta where that happened.

[quote] Scandinavia topped the European charts on rituals and documented evidence of well established and socially accepted practice of child sacrifice.

Scandinavia probably tops the charts on evidence from prehistory because it's 1) cold 2) relatively dry 3) has low-oxygen bogs that preserve organic matter 4) money to spend on research and historical preservation. The fact that a lot of sites have been found is not an indication that its culture was any particular way.

I think Athens did too actually. Athens was remarkable in many ways, but they kind of sucked when it came to women and children. I suspect a lot of ancient Greece did. And the Romans were also all about killing the imperfect babies, but yes, at some point, maybe in the late Republic, they did stop that.

But it's not same to actually sacrifice people/children to the Gods and leave them for nature to take it's course. And in Athens, besides some very few sacrifices very early in their history, put a stop to that. In Sparta was mandatory for all babies to get checked and those found to be deficient were left to die, in Athens I think it was left to the choice of each set of parents.

The Romans didn't do that, but of course they were barbaric in other aspects, like their slavery and their gladatorial games, etc. In fact it was early Christianity that put an end to all of that.

I agree R36, but honestly I'm not sure which is worse. Sacrifice to gain something from the Gods, for everybody, even if wrongheaded, might have a nobler objective than killing every baby you don't like for whatever reason, asking nothing in return. But I guess deep down that has the same motive: save the community from the burden of the deformed or weak. But still, either way, it does kinda suck. And yes, the ancient Romans did go in for exposing babies that had deformities or obvious weaknesses.

Issues of sacrifice aside, the Chimu built some impressive fortresses (still being uncovered) over 1,000 years ago.

Religionists today may not be sacrificing children, but they are every bit as superstitious.

[quote] Well they did go in for exposing babies with deformities of any kind, [R29].

Rome dd that. They put unwanted babies out on the hillside at a garbage dump where it was presumed animals would kill and eat them. My history teacher said childless Romans sometimes went out there and picked up babies and adopted them but I can't imagine the Romans doing such a thing. Bloodlines were very important.

r40 is a conspirafrau. We don't want to hear about your 'blood line' racism.

Oh, I just looked it up and it is said some Ro,an families in need of a slave would take home a baby left to die. They weren't all deformed, some were just unwanted by poor people.

[quote] The exposure of infants, very often but by no means always resulting in death, was widespread in many parts of the Roman Empire. This treatment was inflicted on large numbers of children whose physical viability and legitimacy were not in doubt. It was much the commonest, though not the only, way in which infants were killed, and in many, perhaps most, regions it was a familiar phenomenon. While there was some disapproval of child-exposure, it was widely accepted as unavoidable. Some, especially Stoics, disagreed, as did contemporary Judaism, insisting that all infants, or at least all viable and legitimate infants, should be kept alive. Exposure served to limit the size of families, but also to transfer potential labour from freedom to slavery (or at any rate to de facto slavery). Disapproval of exposure seems slowly to have gained ground. Then, after the sale of infants was authorized by Constantine in A.D. 313, the need for child-exposure somewhat diminished, and at last — probably in 374 — it was subjected to legal prohibition. But of course it did not cease.

Midwives in the UK used to expose or smother disfigured children with a blanket. I remember watching a show about 2 men who had cerebral palsy, a true story. One of them was incomprehensible to everyone except the other man, who would translate for him. They showed a dramatisation of the midwife about to smother one of them at birth (1920s) but the parents prevented her from doing it.

actually, I suspect you're right r43. The official policy and the unofficial policy. Well, I suspect a lot happens in hospitals these days that nobody wants to talk about.

Dear Lord in Heaven!

Dear Lord in Heaven!

and I seriously hope to, r24. Went to Athens last year. Liked it, but kinda didn't love it. I think Peru would actually be more fascinating.

Mental note: investigate "alternative" religions...

The ancient Peruvians wouldn't have handled brats throwing tantrums on planes well.

R47, Peru is cheaper and friendlier than the old Mediterranean ruins, and much safer and less chaotic than Egypt. It doesn't disappoint.

Such tiny people. The average Inca and Mayan make was 5.2," the women around 4'9." I wonder if it was due to types of animal protein. Don't think you'd get very tall on a diet of Guinea pigs.

R51, modern Andean people are still very short-statured. Llamas and alpacas were an occasional source of meat as well, though in the llama's case, it was more often used as a pack animal, and the alpaca was prized for its fine wool. The holy trinity of Incan crops were potatoes, quinoa, and corn -- they still are. Peru probably remains one of the most unchanged countries of the new world.

"Archeologists say the children were sacrificed to the Chimú gods in an attempt to end natural disasters linked with the El Niño phenomenon."

hmmm, am I the only one here to call BS?

why, r53? no El Nino? No Chimu gods? No sacrifice? What are you BSing?

The culprit was a hissing Inca eldergay.

regardless, Peru seems fascinating Arequipa. Hope I make it there some day.

Interesting Peru fact: the oldest civilization in the Americas belonged to ancient Peru, the Norte Chico, dating back to 3200 BC.

The practice of mummification in Peru pre-dates Egypt's mummies by thousands of years.

Lies!

But they never figured out the wheel or made/used metal

wheels on mountain trails don't work so well.

But it is an interesting question, and upends some assumptions about progress.

But not even a spinning wheel, though they had a spindle.

R59, what R60 said. The Inca did know about the wheel, but it was of no practical use because their mountainous terrain made it impractical, and ideally, you need a large beast of burden to haul it. Where the old world had horses and oxen, Peru only had llamas who will only haul up to 75 lbs.

Any burden above 75 pounds and llamas will literally sit down and refuse to budge.

Did they perform trepanation?

R63, yes.

The Inca performed better skull surgery than civil war doctors.

R62, you'd think a small wheeled tool, like a wheelbarrow, would be useful for hauling things short distances. Wheels are so useful, it's hard to believe they had them but never used them for anything.

i think those are great questions r65. don't know. but they didn't keep on with that. who knows why, but it does raise interesting questions.

But I think you need metal in order to make a large wheel work. The fittings of the axle have to be more precise in a large wheel because of friction. I have to look it up.

Anyway, they didn’t have a lot of metal in mesoamerica

R65, yeah, that is a bit of a mystery. The Inca certainly created round, circular objects that could roll around -- at an Incan quarry, I personally saw a massive stone sun-dial [in progress] that was in the shape of a wheel, and it had a notch in the middle.

The Inca left a lot of unfinished projects that never fully saw the light of day because of the Spanish conquest.

What was playing on the mummies' iPod?

A metal rim for a wheel helps to make the rim smoother and that makes something like a wheelbarrow more feasible.

But spinning wheels and pottery wheels were pretty basic.

I heard there were paved roads in mesoamerica, one was 60 miles long. Paved roads are best for wheeled things but not having metal, they wouldnt figure out how to make a rimmed wheel or fittings for axels .

“To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction between these components for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate.

Whoever invented it must have had access to wide slabs of wood from thick-trunked trees in order to carve large, round wheels. They also needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles.”

I always thought it was amazing that ancient people like the Romans and others built deep mines to extract metal. Building above ground was one thing but excavating and building far below the ground was quite a feat. But the work was so difficult that only slaves dug, built and worked in the mines.

Stop being judgmental of ancient cultures, you bigots! We must celebrate and embrace multi-culturalism of the ancient world!

R70, the Inca also built over 18,000 miles of highways and roads, which facilitated the movement of goods, armies, and helped them maintain imperial control. They used a system of relay messengers (chaskis) to help deliver important news and announcements to different parts of the empire.

What I find most interesting is how the contemporaneous Inca and Aztec cultures likely never made any direct contact but shared many commonalities.

Greeks did sacrifice humans, the upthread mentioned documentary begins on Greece and the Roman Empire and its misconceptions. That being said, throwing people to be eaten alive by lions at the Coliseum for the amusement of a sadistic audience is pretty much the same on my book.

I love this thread!

Probably this song, R69.

R18, cuy (guinea pig) tastes like a bony edge of crispy and dark chicken meat. I know it sounds gross, but Andean cultures were eating it as a fast-breeding, low-impact protein source thousands of years before they became furry suburban pets.

Would this be the documentary on ancient worldwide child sacrifice earlier posters were discussing?

Ancient Peru is really fascinating. Arequipa is right. And Holy Crap, there was a Las Vegas Culture! The name alone makes it wonderful. (okay it's Ecuador, but close enough.)

[quote]Any burden above 75 pounds and llamas will literally sit down and refuse to budge.

I guess the Incas invented unions, too.

R80, lol!

A few years back, archaeologists discovered the mummy of a paraplegic child from the Nazca civilization. It showed how that culture cared for those with disabilities.

Peru has ruins right in the middle of Lima.

I think the ancient Greeks did practice human sacrifice in limited way. Remember that the legendary Trojan war started with a human sacrifice? Yes, King Agamemnon was all set to lead the Greek fleet to make war on Troy, but because he'd killed a deer in a way that was against the rules set down by Artemis goddess of the hunt, the winds wouldn't change until he sacrificed his daughter Iphegenia on the altar of the goddess. Given a choice between giving up on the war and killing his own daughter, the SOB killed his own daughter.

And the gladiatorial games and other bloody fun in the arenas of ancient Rome were originally thought of as sacrifices to Mars, god of war. It was only later that mass slaughter in the arena came to be thought of as a fun day out for the kiddies.

Donald Dump is sacrificing tens of thousands of children as we speak.

The Huaca de Luna of the Moche culture is a sacrifice site that can be visited. Three tombs were just uncovered a few years ago there in 2017.

Juanita, the Ice Maiden, on display in Arequipa is a must-visit.

This makes me want to take a tour to Peru.

I do hope the country is doing enough to preserve these treasures though.

I have a MA in anthropology... if you knew how conjectures and hypothesis become theories... with funding from the tourism industry... you would not believe any of this... we just have issues admitting that we just don't know.

R89, Agreed. I also studied cultural anthropology. How do we know there wasn't an extensive plague which led to their demise or a large group of children were poisoned at the same feast? In the case of the former situation perhaps all those who were sick were killed on the same day to prevent the spread of illness to the adults. Those who were sick and over the age of 14 escaped and tried to survive on their own.

OT, but this reminds me of a documentary I watched in one of my pathology classes years ago. It was to teach us how pathologists investigated outbreaks. What is a hypothesis, what are “red herrings,” how do you identify and discard red herrings, etc. this was years before the 4 Corners Outbreak in the US.

There was an outbreak of disease in South America and children started dying. They called the CDC. The CDC sent pathologists down to the area. It was the time of year right after the sugar cane crop was harvested. The residents would burn the remnants of sugar cane after the harvest, so the pathologists wondered if the fires caused small animals or insects to be driven out of the sugar cane area and into the residential area. Or if the smoke had anything to do with it. Was there bacteria from fermented sugar in the smoke?

Anyway, it turned out to be an ear infection that was a normal childhood infection that had become a deadly super-infection. A freak mutation.

Maybe something like that killed the mummified children. I am too suspicious of how they are always declaring mummified bodies or bog/ice bodies to be murder victims, criminal executions or sacrifices. I remember a big body was discovered in the 1800s and they believed the woman’s leg had been broken as a punishment and she was a queen who had been executed. Turned out her leg had been disfigured after death.

To be fair, some of the bog bodies have been found with ropes tightly bound around their necks. I supposed it's possible that a person could hang themselves and end up buried in a bog with the rope neatly cut, but........Occan's razor needs to be applied. I think it's a case by case scenario, since bog mummies have been found in many areas dating back over a wide time range.

One of the bog bodies was reportedly a partial body covered in a leather bag. It turned out the "leather bag" was the upper torso. They decided it was a king who had been sacrificed. There were supposedly cuts that were "ritualistic." The body might be 3,000 years old. As if they could tell if cuts were made premortem or postmortem or if they were even "made" by someone at all and not the result of skin separation from the body being ground up in shifting mud over 3,000 years.

Interesting

That doesn’t look like a mummy.

The coolest ruins in Peru that hardly anybody knows about or visits -- Chavin de Huantar, dating back to 1200 BC. You're allowed to descend into its various dark, winding tunnels.

Just last week, archaeologists unearthed a 3,800 year old mural depicting a toad wrapped around the head of a man -- supposedly celebrating the arrival of water after drought.

Haha R55.

[quote] I do hope the country is doing enough to preserve these treasures though.

R88, with Machu Picchu and the handful of surrounding sites of the sacred valley, Peru is doing a good job maintaining the ruins. It's the bread and butter of their tourism industry, so they have an interest in preserving the area.

Outside of that circle, though, the other 20,000 sites are neglected and not really getting the attention and resources they deserve. Peru is a developing economy and it's difficult for them to allocate the funds and manpower needed to properly maintain these sites. Still, other countries with this amount of ancient sites would probably be doing more to take advantage of their archaeological richness as a tourism magnet. Tourists only know Machu Picchu, but there's so much more there.

Netflix is currently showing a cute Peru themed animation film, Pachamama.

Damn you bitches.

I finally get a ping on my google alerts and it leads me to a thread about sacrificed children? Talk about a buzzkill!

R101, Well, Miss Peru, 'Coco Bolivia' wouldn't have brought you worldwide fame and fortune, right?

R101 Coco, I love your self-portrait at the OP.

Compared to the Aztecs the Incas were a bunch of pikers.

Here's an interesting account of a Viking funeral by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a traveler to the Volga.

They now led her towards the ship. Then she took off two bracelets she was wearing and gave them to the old woman, ‘the Angel of Death’, the one who was going to kill her. She next took off two anklets she was wearing and gave them to the daughters of that woman known by the name ‘the Angel of Death’. They then led her to the ship but did not allow her inside the tent. Then a number of men carrying wooden shields and sticks arrived, and gave her a beaker with nabid. She sang over it and emptied it. The interpreter then said to me, ‘Now with that she is bidding farewell to all her women friends.’ Then she was given another beaker. She took it and sang a lengthy song; but the old woman told her to hurry and drink up and enter the tent where her master was. When I looked at her she seemed completely bewildered. She wanted to enter the tent and she put her head between it and the ship. There the woman took her head and managed to get it inside the tent, and the woman herself followed. Then the men began to beat the shields with the wooden sticks, to deaden her shouts so that the other girls would not become afraid and shrink from dying with their masters. Six men entered the tent and all of them had intercourse with her. Therefore they laid her by the side of her dead master. Two held her hands and two her feet, and the woman called ‘the Angel of Death’ put a cord round the girl’s neck, doubled with an end at each side, and gave it to two men to pull. Then she advanced holding a small dagger with a broad blade and began to plunge it between the girl’s ribs to and from while the two men choked her with the cord till she died.

The Lady of Cao, a tattooed priestess of the Moche culture, was only discovered in 2006 -- along with all of her jewels and treasures.

What is it about Peru that led to so many civilizations being strong there?

R107, good question and wish I knew the answer to that mystery! Peru has so many civilizations clustered and overlapping over one another, of which the Inca was only the final and most well-known. The Caral, Chimu, Moche, Lambayeque, Nazca, Chachapoyas, etc all precede them. I do think that being by the Andes and coast helped nurture many of the right conditions for civilizations -- many of the valleys were fed by glacial runoff, creating a fertile environment for crops.

The great civilizations of the Americas were clustered in two areas -- Peru and Mesoamerica.

[quote]I remember reading about the bog mummies in Europe and the claim that they were criminals who were executed and thrown in a bog or were human sacrifices. How do we know they were ancient drunks who got tangled up in vines or something and fell into the bog

True and I've always wondered about the "mystery" of Stonehenge. Maybe it was just a big open air market where people from different villages came and traded.

For those interested in visiting less touristy, less-traveled pre-Inca ruins, there is an abundance of Chachapoyas ("Cloud Warriors") structures in northern Peru. They lived in circular homes close to the clouds before the warlike Inca conquered them.

The cliffside sarcophagi of the Chachapoyas.

R111: those need their own Tasteful Friends thread.

[quote] R6: Notice ancient dead bodies always died violently - volcanic eruption, murder, execution, human sacrifice.

We have to be careful of confirmation bias. Those are just the graves that have been found.

In my home town in New England, the oldest cemetery has mostly women’s graves. That’s because the men so often died at sea. Not that they never died, and I’ve only found two graves of Blacks before 1800. But am pretty sure they were here and died, too.

[quote] R62: The Inca did know about the wheel, but it was of no practical use because their mountainous terrain made it impractical, and ideally, you need a large beast of burden to haul it. Where the old world had horses and oxen, Peru only had llamas who will only haul up to 75 lbs.

Couldn’t they use slaves? I’ve heard R62’s argument before but never heard the issue of slaves addressed.

r113 they could also all be vampires, which is why there's no graves for them.

Of course, r115, there is that possibility.

r116 Since you brought up vampires, here's a folk legend about the "pishtaco", which is a Peruvian/Bolivian legend about fat-sucking vampires.

...

According to folklore, a pishtaco is an evil monster-like man—often a stranger and often a white man—who seeks out unsuspecting Indians to kill them and abuse them in many ways. The legend dates back to the Spanish conquest of South America. Primarily, this has been stealing their body fat for various cannibalistic purposes, or cutting them up and selling their flesh as fried chicharrones. Pishtaco derives from the local Quechua-language word "pishtay" which means to "behead, cut the throat, or cut into slices".[2]

The preoccupation with body fat has a long tradition in the Andes region. Pre-Hispanic natives prized fat so much that a deity, Viracocha (meaning sea of fat), existed for it. It is also natural for the peasant rural poor to view fleshiness and excess body fat as the very sign of life, good health, strength and beauty. Many illnesses are thought to have their roots in the loss of body fats, and skeletal thinness is abhorred.[3] With this, the conquistadores' practice of treating their wounds with their enemies' corpse fats horrified the Indians.[4] Spaniards, are also said to have killed Indians and boiled their corpses to produce fat to grease their metal muskets and cannons, which rusted quickly in the humid Amazon.[5]

Andean Aboriginals feared Spanish missionaries as pishtacos, believing the missionaries were killing people for fat, thereafter oiling churchbells to make them especially sonorous.[6] In modern times, similar beliefs held that sugar mill machinery needed human fat as grease,[7][8] or that jet aircraft engines could not start without a squirt of human fat.[9]

Pishtaco beliefs have affected international assistance programs, e.g. leading to rejection of the US Food for Peace program by several communities, out of fears that the real purpose was to fatten children and later exploit them for their fat.[9] Natives have attacked survey geologists working on the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano who believed that the geologists were pishtacos.[10] The work of anthropologists has been stymied because measurements of fat folds were rumoured to be part of a plot to select the fattest individuals later to be targeted by pishtacos.[8] In 2009, the pishtaco legend was cited as a possible contributory factor in the apparent fabrication of a story by Peruvian police of a gang murdering up to 60 people to harvest their fat.[11]

R92, applying Occan's razor in an abusive way is called stupidity. Objective research is soooooo expensive that is is extremely rarely funded. Europeans destroyed everything, and mythified what remains for obvious political and economic reasons. You can't know what happened, no way, but we live in a culture that will not just say "we don't know"... The only thing you can do is go to these sites, sit in silence and look... no documentary, no book, no course funded by Rockefeller and Ford can explain ANY of it...

[quote] Natives have attacked survey geologists working on the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano who believed that the geologists were pishtacos.

R117, very interesting post. I also wonder how much of that mistrust from Andean people is because the last time outsiders came, it was in the form of Shining Path guerrillas in the '80s and '90s, bringing with them a crazy, violent form of Maoist terror. Unfortunately, that part of the country has seen a lot of bloodshed and tragedy in their dealings with outside interests.

R114, the Inca supposedly did not use slavery (in the legal sense of people being owned as chattel or property of others). They did have an abundant source of peasants, however, who were all expected to put in physical labor. This compulsory service was probably as back-breaking as slave-work however.

Nobody really knows how they moved these massive blocks and to use for constructing their temples and citadels. It's theorized that the rocks were extracted and chiseled at mountainside quarries, and then they used rope, gravity, and manpower to push them down to the valley floor. From there, they were somehow dragged across the valley using a system similar to the picture below. And then they were somehow hauled up to another mountainside. With some of these stones weighing over a ton, it was a helluva lot of work!

If you ever visit the town of Ollantaytambo, you can find massive blocks that were abandoned in transit -- that was the moment the Spaniards arrived.

"Pishtaco beliefs have affected international assistance programs, e.g. leading to rejection of the US Food for Peace program by several communities, out of fears that the real purpose was to fatten children and later exploit them for their fat."

Ridiculous! Why would an American go to the Amazon basin to harvest human body fat, when we're all so close to Walmarts?

It was UFOs, R120.

It certainly wasn't a race of mutant Lesbians!

I thoght the Inca and Aztecs traded, R73?

R124, it's possible that they traded but it is mostly seen as unlikely, and if they did, it was indirectly in a sort of Silk Road kind of way. While the Aztec were pushing their empire southward and the Inca were extending north, the Darien Gap on the Panamanian isthmus likely proved to be a barrier against direct contact -- it's an impenetrable, large swath of jungle that separates South America from North America. Even today, it's the only portion of the Americas where there is no Pan-American Highway, so you can't drive from Panama to Colombia or vice versa -- you have to take a boat or fly.

So if they did trade, it involved somebody using boats.

Arequipa, I could listen to you all day. Thank you so much.

I find it hard to believe that they didn’t trade. Two empires, relatively close, must have each had unique products that the other wanted. And were there is money to be made, people find a way.

At least one ancient Egyptian pharaoh had tobacco and cocaine in his system. Both are native to the Americas. They also found chicken bones in pre-Colombian America, and they were not native to the Americas. They think the chickens came from Polynesians.

"At least one ancient Egyptian pharaoh had tobacco and cocaine in his system. Both are native to the Americas. "

You do realize that the likeliest explanation for that is … lab error?

Blame these violent games.

R128, I googled it, and it seems that it’s not lab error.

But I thought that humanity before all violent games were peaceful? Who lived dancing in circles spacing peace and love until evil capitalism and satanic video games taught people violence.

A google search finds that the Inca and Aztec did not trade with each other, but I don’t believe it. The ancient Chinese knew about Ancient Rome. Were the New World inhabitants not curious? Did they have no explorers?

They probably played a lot of violent games like God of War.

I wonder, r132, first what exactly the ancient Chinese "knew" about ancient Rome, or was it all rumors and weird stories. Maybe the Incas and Aztecs had that kind of thing. The weird magical people North or South of us. Certainly the Middle Age Europeans had all kinds of fantastical stories about peoples at the edge of their world. And so did Ancient peoples.

I think trading between the old and new started a lot earlier than we think.

^^^^and who is to say that Atlantis wasn't based on some New World city.

Always wished we were Atlantis instead of America. America was a weird mapmaker's name. Atlantis, the mysterious lost land that rises back up out of the Atlantic Ocean. Oh, well.

Me, R136.

I believe Atlantis was the Ancient Minoan civilization on Santorini in the Mediterranean. It was destroyed by a volcanic eruption about 1600 BC. They were a big power and very advanced. Their home island was completely destroyed. We don’t know a lot about them, but the fit the stories.

nothing really fits, though, does it r138? Was it big enough? was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules? Did Plato make the whole thing up, or hear it from some Egyptian priest who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who ...

"I wonder, [R132], first what exactly the ancient Chinese "knew" about ancient Rome, or was it all rumors and weird stories."

There was indirect trade between ancient Rome and China. Silks traveled along the Silk Road from China to Rome, and when the silk brocades the Chinese used as trade goods got to the Roman empire, they were unwoven and re-woven into light, sheer, expensive fabrics suitable to the hot Italian climate.

I don't know of any Romans traveling to China or vice versa, but the two great empires had to know of each other's existence.

ancient trade routes are fascinating. it leads to vague knowledge without real knowledge. Britons traded tin all over Europe. I bet they had crazy stories about far flung peoples. I bet the Chinese and Romans did too. The ancient Greeks believed that Ethiopians were specially loved of the Gods and had lunch with them periodically. Not sure where that came from, but I kinda love it.

And I know we are kind of off topic here, but I bet Incas and Aztecs had weird and crazy stories about each other.

R126, thank you! I love discussing Peru's ancient and modern history -- a place I know well and something I studied. It's so random to most people that I don't I get to do too much of it in real life these days!

[quote] R139: nothing really fits, though, does it [R138]? Was it big enough? was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules? Did Plato make the whole thing up, or hear it from some Egyptian priest who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who ...

I think it was big enough. The civilization had satellite settlements that were probably assumed into other empires when the main island was lost. They would have told the story. It was not beyond the pillars of Hercules. It would have been before Plato’s time, so he would have heard the story as it was passed down to him. This isn’t actually my theory, so much as it is a bunch of scholars’ theory.

yeah we do kinda love you guy. so incas and aztecs, who would win?

[quote] Two empires, relatively close, must have each had unique products that the other wanted.

R127, that's part of the reason why it's doubtful that they made much contact. Both had desirable goods that the other would have wanted and could have used but neither ended up having it. The Incas would have loved the prized cacao, and the Aztecs could have made great use of potatoes and llamas/alpacas as livestock/pack animals, but neither had them at the time of conquest.

Both civilizations were relatively short-lived, though, so I think if they had had more time, they would have undoubtedly made contact, trade, and possibly a sort of clash of the Titans. It is also possible that they did have limited maritime trade or at least knew of each other -- nobody really knows 100%.

When my BF was in college, he was taking Africana studies, and he used to ask me for help when he'd write his papers. I would read his textbooks to understand the courses, and was surprised at some of the theories being spelled out as factual, like the idea that the Olmecs in Mexico had to be descendants of African explorers. I tried to make the point that theory is not the same thing as fact: theory is great if it helps you look for facts, of course. For all the stories about Vikings exploring the New World, L'Anse aux Meadows is the only place in the New World (if you don't count Greenland) where there is unequivocal evidence of Viking settlement in North America. They've found artifacts high in the Canadian arctic indicating trade, but settlement was much more rare.

If a piece of pottery from Central American shows up in context in the Andes, it would indicate some degree of trade between the two regions. But that doesn't seem to have been discovered (yet). Which just means people need to keep looking. A tiny bit of Chinese silk was discovered in an Egyptian tomb several years ago. It may have just been a tiny shred, but it's tangible proof of some interaction, even if it was through many hands. Roman coins have been found in China, Vietnam, and even Japan. That doesn't really prove that Roman sailors themselves visited those lands, only that there was at least indirect trade between the East and West back to the early Christian era, if not earlier.

I won't look for the references right now, but I thought it was proven than chickens made it to the New World prior to European exploration, which would almost certainly indicate a Polynesian origin. And, unlike some types of plants, that could possibly make it across the ocean without human intervention, I don't think anyone would conjecture that chickens would be able to cross the ocean without the aid of humans.

BTW. you can Google 'cocaine mummies', and there's an interesting documentary from Channel4 (UK), which left me very confused indeed. I won't pretend that I can argue any points in that case: it really defies everything I've been taught, so that I figure I'll need to go back and revisit the subject at some point.

Forgot to add, here's a carving of an okapi (from Central Africa) being presented at Persepolis in Iran. The okapi wasn't formally recognized in the West until 1901,

R144, that is a tough one! Both empires were warlike and had incredibly strong militaries who subjugated and absorbed neighboring tribes through force. Both had their pros and cons. The Aztecs had superior weaponry (the atlatl, the obsidian sword), more ferocity in quick battles, and ruled by fear. But the Inca had a larger military, logistical advantages (roads), slightly better diplomacy (maybe more allies), and more centralized power. The Aztecs fought many wars to capture prisoners for sacrifice -- The Incas just went in for the kill. I think any war between the two would have reached a rather bloody stalemate.

Both empires met parallel fates -- they were disliked and feared enough by neighboring tribes that the Spaniards used this to their advantage to gain allies and divide and conquer.

Imagine how many Polynesian scouts must have been sent out, to find Hawaii! Probably a lot. Then, they had to get home, gather the tribe, and find Hawaii again, to settle there! I assume that’s how they did it. They must have been great sailors and navigators!

I believe that they must have found South America. Maybe future DNA tests will show this?

[quote] What is it about Peru that led to so many civilizations being strong there?

You could ask the same of just about every European or Asian country.

R150, false.

How accurate was Apocalypto? If this scene is true I'd thinking meeting up with the Aztecs would be scary for anyone.

R152, Apocalypto was a sort of mishmash of the Mayans and Aztecs. The movie was supposed to be about the Maya -- they're speaking Mayan in the clip above and referencing Kukulkan, a Mayan deity -- but the sacrifices shown in the film were more typical of the Aztecs. Mayans practiced sacrifice, too, but on a much smaller scale.

Also, the timeline of the film (with the arrival of the Spanish) is more along the lines of the Aztec: Mayan civilization collapsed around 900 AD, decades before contact with the Spaniards.

^centuries, not decades.

If you ever visit Cuzco, they do an Inti Raymi festival every year that is pretty epic. Visit June 24th if you wanna check it out.

This guy evaluates the accuracy of movies. He’s pretty entertaining. Apocalypto was a great movie, even if it wasn’t very accurate,

The first time I saw Apocalypto, my heart was beating real hard throughout the movie.

R156, thanks, that was interesting. Apocalypto wasn't terribly accurate, but it worked as a good adventure thriller with amazing costume design. Whoever designed the costumes must have had a great time. I wish someone would make a [more accurate] epic film about the Incas!

The “King” in Apocalypto, the guy sitting in the chair on top of the pyramid, he looks as high as a kite, doesn’t he? He just sits there, immobilized.

R159, yeah. He had a pretty easy role!

If you visit any of the ruins along Peru's coast, you will see the ancient Peruvian hairless dogs. Almost wiped out to extinction by the Spaniards -- who thought they were satanic dogs -- they're making somewhat of a comeback, as Peru has embraced them as a national icon.

[quote] [R150], false.

Prove it.

Prove that Europe and Asia did not have civilizations which left art, buildings, palaces and other relics throughout history. And they also had the wheel, written language, paper, books and figured out metallurgy

R162 the question was specifically about Peru. The amount of sophisticated civilizations it had, all on top of each other in the same area, with ruins all over the place.

R162, I never said any of that. Ancient Peru is one of six cradles of civilization though -- that is a fact.

MissCoco is that really you!

Are the Nazca lines worth seeing?

R166, the Nazca Lines are definitely worth it. The aerial view of the ancient, mysterious geoglyphs is pretty otherworldly. Just be prepared to pay more for the flight (which lasts about 30 minutes) than other tourist attractions in the country -- about $100, which is still a steal IMO. I recommend paying more for a reputable flight. Also, consider anti-nausea meds if you're prone to motion sickness. There are some hard turns that can make you feel queasy.

Weren't there any fraus around to scream What about the children then?

I prefer the ancient Egyptians. Pyramids! The Sphinx! Trippy human bodies with animal heads art!

Said DataLounge, "it's a good start"

R169, Ancient Egypt is most definitely fascinating, but personally I would prefer to visit Peru for a number of reasons. In a nutshell, it's a more scenic country than Egypt, has different styles of pyramids and ruins from distinct cultures, and is not frighteningly anti-gay.

R14, I once read or saw that the great civilizations all arose in an area that could and did grow starches:

Egypt and Mesopotamia- wheat

China and India - rice

Peru - potatoes

Mexico - maize

Or was India more of a wheat place?

R172, I think both wheat and barley. That's a very interesting and probably theory!

If you ever do visit Peru, check out Arequipa -- the literal casa blancas city in South America.

Did they at least get a last meal?

Both the Aztecs and the Maya practiced bloodletting. If you were a noble, especially in the Mayan world, it was your job to offer your blood to the gods. Men cut their penises with stingray spines or as linked below, pulled ropes/cords through their tongues.

R176, ouch! Especially on that penis part.

We went to Peru in September a few years ago and happened to be in Cuzco the same day as a festival for teenage boys where they represented the four geographic areas of Inca power and were engaging in feats of strength and song and dance. It would have been trippy even if I hadn’t been suffering from altitude sickness.

R178, that sounds like you probably saw a portion of something like the Inti Raymi festival. Peru has pretty amazing traditional festivals all throughout the year.

Thanks for that video.

I just looked it up and it must have been Warachikuy.

What a wonderful place to visit!

Ms Patsy, Glad to see you in such fine form lately. You must be finding time to work on your hobbies. How is the taxidermy going? Miss you!

Machu Picchu was possibly purposely built on intersecting fault lines for a reason.

I finally visited Machu Picchu and it was well worth it. It actually exceeded my expectations despite the crowds. I stayed in a wonderful resort in the sacred valley which was perfect for checking out many of the sites. My only regret is not staying longer!

R184, I'm glad you enjoyed your trip! I've been to Peru and Machu Picchu twice and I'm planning for a long, extended volunteer-travel trip in two years! I want to explore some more of the northern area near Chachapoyas.

Vogue and the Washington Post have gotten into Peru recently.

The Telegraph promoting some of the northern Peru sites which get about 2% of tourist traffic as Machu Picchu does. I totally agree with them -- snow-topped glaciers, waterfalls, and archaeological sites you'll have mostly to yourself.

I would go but I'm afraid of altitude sickness.

R188, if you give your body enough time to acclimatize, the effects of altitude sickness won't feel as severe. When you arrive in Cuzco, don't do much else the first day or two except rest. Keep hydrated. Avoid alcohol. If you're really concerned, book a hotel with oxygen tanks or oxygen-enriched rooms. The site below has some good tips.

Also, not all of Peru's tourist attractions are at crazy elevation. Only the ones on the Andean corridor (Sacred Valley, Lake Titicaca).

Are Sendero Luminoso still a danger? They were a huge menace when I wanted to visit after college. In fact, they exploded a bomb on the Machu Picchu train just a few months before I planned on going and that put an end to that.

We have a different version of it today.

It's called sex tourism.

Dear R188, there’s a medication you can take to avoid altitude sickness. But even if you are foolhardy like my wife and I were, if you stay at the Belmond hotels you’ll be fine even if you do get sick.

(Altitude sickness is super miserable and I don’t recommend intentionally getting it, but the sensory changes it causes, plus the weird anxiety add to the trippiness of Cuzco.)

R190, the Shining Path as a terrorist counterinsurgency has all but been eliminated. They still exist in a much smaller, weakened form and are mainly associated with cocaine trade in an area of the country of little tourist interest.

If you're ever in Lima, the city has a great museum dedicated to the war in those years.

Some nice, clear drone footage of Machu Picchu.

The infamous llamas of Machu Picchu.

Thanks for the tips, R189 and R192. I've been wanting to make this trip happen for years. Now that I'm retired, I might finally make it out there.

R196, definitely go if you can! I've traveled to around 30 countries and Peru is probably my favorite.

Some tips for those visiting Peru's rainbow mountain.

Wow, I've never seen that before. That's gorgeous.

R199, it really is a sight to behold! Luck has to be in your favor though because weather conditions could make the view cloudy or overcast.

Recreation of Incan society.

Do they have child sacrifices too?

R202, occasionally, Mrs. Ramsey! The children of Llullaillaco are three frozen mummies who were sacrificed by the Inca and discovered recently, in 1999. The Inca only practiced sacrifice during or after important ceremonies and it was never at the large scale as other civilizations.

Arequipa, thank you for your contribution to this thread! I’ve learned so much from you. I wish I could take you out for coffee or drinks or dinner as a token of my gratitude.

R204, thank you for listening! It's a topic I love discussing, and in fact, I'm planning a third, extended trip to Peru in two years!

Did the Inca drink Inca Cola because that shit tastes like alpaca piss!!

R206, definitely not. It was created in the 1930s by a British immigrant. It's more popular than Coca Cola there though, so great marketing on their part. Definitely an acquired taste, unless you love bubblegum soda.

R105 , Were there any bits of pineapple found in her throat ?

R105 , Were there any bits of pineapple found in her throat ?

On all these ancient trade routes between Civilizations were there adequate Cracker Barrels to feed the masses ?

R209, no -- no pineapple. But possibly a unique form of sweet potato.

This is new!

---

Hundreds of years ago, the west coast of South America was ruled by the Incas - a mysterious empire considered to be the most elaborate society to exist in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. This is not their story.

For long before the Incas held dominion over the sweeping lands stretching from Colombia to Chile, an even more mysterious and ancient society inhabited this elevated Andean region.

This older empire was called the Tiwanaku state, whom we know even less about. At their peak, they may have only numbered 10,000 to 20,000 people.

What scarce details we do know about the Tiwanaku state come from archaeological finds, uncovering a trail of clues about the Tiwanaku people and their long-gone culture. Back in April, scientists announced the discovery of a big new piece of the puzzle.

In the first systematic archaeological dive and excavation conducted in the waters of the Khoa Reef, close to the Island of the Sun in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca, researchers found submerged evidence of ritual offerings made to supernatural deities – meaning religion existed in this part of the world a lot earlier than we thought.

"People often associate the Island of the Sun with the Incas because it was an important pilgrimage location for them and because they left behind numerous ceremonial buildings and offerings on and around this island," says anthropologist Jose Capriles from Pennsylvania State University.

"Our research shows that the Tiwanaku people, who developed in Lake Titicaca between 500 and 1,100 CE, were the first people to offer items of value to religious deities in the area."

Capriles and his team used sonar and underwater 3D photogrammetry to scan and map the reef during a 19-day research visit to Lake Titicaca during 2013.

Dredging the sediment in the lake, they found puma-shaped incense burners, with fragments of charcoal present on the excavated deposits, and a number of gold, shell, and stone ornaments.

...

The LA Times devoted en entire weekend Travel section to Peru a few weeks back!