W*****B
发帖数: 4796 | 1 古代印加帝国的祭祀真尼玛残忍。
Exclusive: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World's Largest -
National Geographic
https://apple.news/A2kHgistDRNKM4L-HviJu0g
Exclusive: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World's Largest
More than 140 children were ritually killed in a single event in Peru more
than 500 years ago. What could possibly have been the reason?
Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the
Americas— and likely in world history—has been discovered on Peru's
northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.
More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually
sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept
bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the
sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.
Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led
by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of
Tulane University, are ongoing. The work is supported by grants from the
National Geographic Society.
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 Chimú civilization is unprecedented in
the Americas—if not in the entire world.
"I, for one, never expected it," says Verano, a physical
anthropologist who has worked in the region for more than three decades. &#
34;And I don't think anyone else would have, either."
The researchers are in the process of submitting a report on scientific
results of the discovery to a peer-reviewed, scientific journal.
A Stunning Tally, and a Tragic End
The sacrifice site, formally known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, is located on
a low bluff just a thousand feet from the sea, amid a growing spread of
cinderblock residential compounds in Peru's northern Huanchaco district.
Less than half a mile to the east of the site is the UNESCO World Heritage
site of Chan Chan, the ancient Chimú administrative center, and beyond its
walls, the modern provincial capital of Trujillo.
(See massive ancient drawings discovered in the Peruvian desert.)
At its peak, the Chimú Empire controlled a 600-mile-long territory along
the Pacific coast and interior valleys from the modern Peru-Ecuador border
to Lima.
Only the Inca commanded a larger empire than the Chimú in pre-Columbian
South America, and superior Inca forces put an end to the Chimú Empire
around A.D. 1475.
Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (generally referred to by the researchers as "
Las Llamas,") first made headlines in 2011, when the remains of 42
children and 76 llamas were found during an emergency dig directed by study
co-author Prieto. An archaeologist and Huanchaco native, Prieto was
excavating a 3,500-year-old temple down the road from the sacrifice site
when local residents first alerted him to human remains eroding from nearby
coastal dunes.
By the time excavations concluded at Las Llamas in 2016, more than 140 sets
of child remains and 200 juvenile llamas had been discovered at the site;
rope and textiles found in the burials are radiocarbon dated to between 1400
and 1450.
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 remains of three adults—a man and two women—were found in close
proximity of the children and animals. Signs of blunt-force trauma to the
head and a lack of grave goods with the adult bodies lead researchers to
suspect that they may have played a role in the sacrifice event and were
dispatched shortly thereafter.
The 140 sacrificed children ranged in age from about five to 14, with the
majority between the ages of eight and 12; most were buried facing west, out
to the sea. The llamas were less than 18 months old and generally interred
facing east, toward the high peaks of the Andes.
A Scatter of Footprints, Frozen in Time
The investigators believe all of the human and animal victims were ritually
killed in a single event, based on evidence from a dried mud layer found in
the eastern, least disturbed part of the 7,500-square-foot site. They
believe the mud layer once covered the entire sandy dune where the ritual
took place, and it was disturbed during the preparation of the burial pits
and the subsequent sacrifice event.
(Why were these ancient shark fishermen buried with extra limbs?)
Archaeologists discovered the footprints of sandaled adults, dogs, barefoot
children, and young llamas preserved in the mud layer, with deep skid marks
illustrating where reluctant four-legged offerings may have been forcibly
coaxed to their end.
An analysis of the footprints may also enable the archaeologists to
reconstruct the ritual procession: It appears that a group of children and
llamas was led to the site from the north and the south edges of the bluff,
meeting in the center of the site, where they would have been sacrificed and
buried. The bodies of a few children and animals were simply left in the
wet mud.
An Unprecedented Event?
If the archaeologists' conclusion is correct, Huanchaquito-Las Llamas
may be compelling scientific evidence for the largest single mass child
sacrifice event known in world history.
Until now, the largest mass child sacrifice event for which we have physical
evidence is the ritual murder and interment of 42 children at Templo Mayor
in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (modern-day Mexico City).
The discovery of individual child sacrifice victims recovered from Inca
mountaintop rituals has also captured the world's attention.
Outside of the Americas, archaeologists at sites such as the ancient
Phoenician city of Carthage debate whether child remains found there
constitute ritual sacrifice and, if so, if such ritual events took place
over the course of decades or even centuries.
Verano emphasizes that such clear-cut evidence for deliberate, singular mass
sacrificial events such as those evidenced at Las Llamas, however, is
extremely rare to find in archaeological contexts.
Analysis of the remains from Las Llamas shows that both children and llamas
were killed with consistent, efficient, transverse cuts across the sternum.
A lack of hesitant ("false start") cuts indicates that they were
made by one or more trained hands.
"It is ritual killing, and it's very systematic," Verano says.
Human sacrifice has been practiced in nearly all corners of the globe at
various times, and scientists believe that the ritual may have played an
important role in the development of complex societies through social
stratification and control of populations by elite social classes.
(See the face of an ancient South American queen reconstructed for the first
time.)
Most societal models that look at human sacrifice, however, are based on the
ritual killing of adults, says Joseph Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at
the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Human History.
"I think it's definitely harder to explain child sacrifice," he
says, then pauses.
"Also, at a personal level."
Negotiation With Supernatural Forces
The mass sacrifice of only children and young llamas that took place at Las
Llamas, however, appears to be a phenomenon previously unknown in the
archaeological record, and it immediately raises the question: What would
motivate the Chimú to commit such an act?
Prieto concedes that this is often the first question he encounters when he
shares his research at Las Llamas with scientific colleagues and the local
community.
"When people hear about what happened and the scale of it, the first
thing they always ask is why."
The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the
researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on
the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event
related to El-Nio.
Elevated sea temperatures characteristic of El Nio would have disrupted
marine fisheries in the area, while coastal flooding could have overwhelmed
the Chimú's extensive infrastructure of agricultural canals.
The Chimú succumbed to the Inca only decades after the sacrifices at Las
Llamas.
Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has
excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region,
at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley
, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las
Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast
may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults
wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Nio.
"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them,"
he explains. "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."
"It's impossible to know without a time machine," Klaus says,
adding that the Las Llamas discovery is important in that it adds to our
knowledge about ritual violence and variations on human sacrifice in the
Andes.
"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."
Future Histories for Past Victims
The scientific team investigating the Las Llamas sacrifices is now
undertaking the painstaking work of unraveling the life histories of the
victims—such as who they were and where they may have come from.
Although it is difficult to determine sex based on skeletal remains at such
a young age, preliminary DNA analysis indicates that both boys and girls
were victims, and isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn
from local populations but likely came from different ethnic groups and
regions of the Chimú Empire.
(Discover an ancient throne and ceremonial hall unearthed in Peru.)
Evidence for cranial modification, practiced in some highland areas at the
time, also supports the idea that children were brought to the coast from
farther-flung areas of Chimú influence.
Since the discovery at Las Llamas, the research team has discovered
archaeological evidence around Huanchaco for similar, contemporaneous mass
child-llama sacrifice sites, which are the subject of ongoing scientific
investigation with the support of the National Geographic Society.
"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 in the area
for future research," says Prieto.
"This just may be the tip of the iceberg."
_ |
|
