Lake Titicaca Underwater Offerings and the Ritualization of Bodies of Water during the Inca Period

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As the Inca Empire expanded across the South American Andes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE, Lake Titicaca became its mythical place of origin and a major pilgrimage complex was built on the Island of the Sun. Nevertheless, before the Inca conquest Lake Titicaca was an inland sea that offered enormous socio-economic opportunities for navigation, fishing, trade, etc., which the Inca redirected to mainly ritual functions. A series of rules and taboos restricted numerous activities on the lake and encouraged others, such underwater offering practices, aimed at transforming and maintaining this space within the cosmological order. Underwater Inca offerings, consisting of miniature figurines made of precious materials were discovered in sealed stone boxes in the Khoa reef off the Island of the Sun. In the light of a recently reported stone offering box from a reef close to the lake’s north-eastern shore, this presentation will discuss the location, content and broader sociocultural context of Inca sacrifices to illuminate the religious and social meaning of underwater ritual offerings at Lake Titicaca.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32539