Short life (image: Sam Scholes) Slashed to the bone (image: Sam Scholes)

Sacrifice is an age-old ritual, but the inhabitants of 10th-century Peru brought sinister novelty to their rites by slaughtering children.


In the Lambayeque valley on the north coast of the country, the earliest definitive evidence of ritual child sacrifice has been uncovered. The bloodletting took place at a site called Cerro Cerrillos.

“The scale and sheer complexity of the blood sacrifice of children at Cerro Cerrillos appears to be something completely new,” said Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem.

This practice, which emerged between 900 and 1100 AD, may have been a way for a particular ethnic group – the Muchik – to solidifying their cultural identity in a landscape dominated by another, elite ethnic group, the Sicán.

Teeth and bones

To investigate the role of ritual sacrifice in the Middle Sicán period, researchers examined 81 skeletons at the sacrificial site, probing their teeth and bones to determine who they were and why they’d been killed. The researchers found that 70 per cent of the identifiable victims were anaemic Muchik children, aged 2 to 15, who’d lived out their short lives on an inferior diet of maize and squash.

Analysis of skeletal slash marks shows that each victim had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck or chest with a metal knife, and the chest cavities pried open, perhaps to encourage more bloodletting, or to extract the heart, and to remove the lungs for divination. Klaus’s team also discovered the seeds of Nectandra plants near the skeletons. Since these have paralytic and hallucinogenic properties, Klaus suggests that the drug might have been given to the victims before the ritual killing began.

After the bloodletting, victims’ bodies were allowed to decompose for a month or longer, swaddled in shrouds and then laid to rest amid ritual feasting. Bits of llama bones scattered about the burial site suggest the revellers dined on llama roast, and put aside the legs and heads for the dead children, lest they get peckish in the afterlife. “It was sort of like Finnegans Wake, with more corn beer,” said Klaus.

The ancestors of the Muchik, the Moche, sacrificed warriors in their rituals, so what made the Muchik pick on children?

Klaus speculates that the rituals may have been driven by the failure of the Moche warrior sacrifices to drive away bad weather brought by El Nino. If adults didn’t work, why not try kids? When the belief system and the religion were challenged by reality, he says, it could have had knock-on effects. “It shows the interplays between environmental change, culture, politics and religion.”

But it’s impossible to determine whether the people who killed the Cerro Cerrillos children were even the same people who buried them, let alone why they were sacrificed. Klaus says that the site nevertheless provides an insight into ancient socioeconomic inequality and how “ritual and performance can create group identity”.

Anthropologist John Verano of Tulane University, New Orleans, doesn’t buy a direct relationship between El Nino and Moche sacrifice. “My excavations of a sequence of several hundred years of Moche sacrifices at the Huaca de la Luna found no association with catastrophic weather events.”

Journal reference: Antiquity, vol 84, p 1102