Sacrificed Incan Children Died Full of Coca and Alcohol

Now that I know that the Incans fed drugs and alcohol to the children they sacrificed, I’m not sure if I feel better or worse about Incan child sacrifice.

Researchers ran tests on three creepily well-preserved mummies—a boy and a girl who were four or five, and one 13-year-old girl. They were discovered in 1999 in a shrine near a the summit of a volcano in Argentina, buried some 500 years ago.

Forensics tests on the teenage girl revealed that, for the last year of her life, she switched from eating potatoes to a diet of llama meat and maize. An analysis of her hair—performed by researchers just as if she were a potential employee—revealed that during the same period her consumption of coca spiked as well. Coca is the plant that cocaine is extracted from, and a large lump of coca quid was found in the mummy’s mouth.

The coca leaves contain only trace amounts of the alkaloid that is turned into coke, but the coca levels detected in the mummy were much higher than other ancient coca-leaf chewers. The tests also revealed that she ingested a large amount of alcohol (probably from fermented corn) in her last final weeks of life.

The paper reveals other morally implacable things, like how the mummy shows no signs of violence, indicating that she was sedated and left near the top of the volcano to die, which makes her posture all the more unsettling. Also, according to Incan child-sacrifice traditions as recorded by the Spanish, she was probably a very lovely young Incan.

"From what we know of the Spanish chronicles, particularly attractive or gifted women were chosen. The Incas actually had someone who went out to find these young women and they were taken from their families," Emma L. Brown, one of the co-authors of the study, told the BBC.

So, just to add all of this up: child sacrifice—that seems bad. Sedating children who are to be sacrificed—that’s, better, I guess, right? Giving children alcohol and the plant that births cocaine? Well, these are bad things. But of course the children are going to be sacrificed anyway. They’re not going to be gutted or anything, which is nice. But they are going to be left alone to die at the top of a volcano–which isn't enviable.

And then, if we want to get meta, who am I—some white guy living comfortably New World, whose own culture gets a lot of mileage out of the sacrifice of a single Honey Boo Boo now and then—to feel squeamish about some other culture from hundreds of years ago that I know next to nothing about? But what kind of bullshit is that? Isn’t it our duty to call out injustice wherever we see?

Isn’t child sacrifice, whether the kids get to live like 1980s day traders leading up to them or not, pretty universally frowned upon these days? I mean, I don't want to be intolerant or anything but, yikes.

Anyway, now you know. Adjust your own moral compass accordingly.