"While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec, Maya and Inca have been recorded in colonial-era Spanish chronicles and documented in modern scientific excavations, the discovery of a large-scale child sacrifice event in the little-known pre-Columbian Chimu civilization is unprecedented in the Americas — if not in the entire world," National Geographic said. Lima: Archaeologists in Peru have found evidence of the biggest-ever sacrifice of children, uncovering the remains of more than 140 youngsters who were slain alongside 200 llamas as part of a ritual offering some 550 years ago, National Geographic announced on Thursday. Verano is a physical anthropologist who has worked in the region for more than three decades.Although the study has yet to be published, the researchers involved explained their work in a National Geographic exclusive published on Thursday, April 26.The size of the child sacrifice event dwarfs the ritual killings of 42 children previously uncovered in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, points out National Geographic, and it must have been very gruesome. The skulls—marked with a red ceremonial pigment, per the An accidental discovery of skeletal remains in 2011 on a site formerly known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas was the precursor to an archaeological excavation that began in 2014.The delay between the initial discovery and actual examination of the site was held up until the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, were able to get sufficient funding for. “I, for one, never expected it,” John Verano, a physical anthropologist with decades of experience in the region, told National Geographic. The site where the children and baby llamas were found has been under excavation since 2011, when the site first made headlines after the discovery of 42 children and 76 llamas during an emergency dig. The excavation, conducted in 2016, revealed the remains of more than 140 children and 200 young llamas that had been sacrificed around A.D. 1450 near the capital of the Chimu Empire, an area that is now the city of Trujillo on Peru’s northern coast. Radiocarbon dating of ropes left around many of the llama's necks dates the event to 1450 AD, about 20 years before the Chimu empire was conquered by the Incan empire.To understand a bit more about what happened 550 years ago, we have to go back in time to examine what we do know about the Chimu people. a proper excavation.During three years of careful excavation, the archaeologists found that over 140 children, between the ages of 5 and 14 years of age, along with 200 young llamas were ritually sacrificed and buried on a bluff overlooking Peru’s northern shoreline, in the shadow of what was then the capital city of Chan Chan, a large adobe city in the Moche Valley of present-day Trujillo, Peru.“There are no other examples of child sacrifices anywhere in the world that compares to the magnitude of this Chimú event,” Verano says. Families believed their child would become deified and they were usually sacrificed around the age of five.At the excavation site, the children were found to be facing west, toward the ocean, while the young llamas were facing east, toward the Andes Mountains. "The skeletal remains of both children and animals show evidence of cuts to the sternum as well as rib dislocations, which suggest that the victims' chests were cut open and pulled apart, perhaps to facilitate the removal of the heart," the magazine said.
Bone remains of more than 140 children and about 200 young llamas were found in the Peruvian city of Trujillo, near the Chan Chan citadel, according to a National Geographic publication. This discovery, which would date from the time of the little-known Chimú pre-Columbian civilization (about 550 years ago), would be, for researchers, the largest mass sacrifice of children in the American continent.