Death that Endures: A Bioarchaeological and Biogeochemcial Study of Human Sacrifices from the Moche Valley, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This project investigates how rituals of human sacrifice performed by the Chimú Empire (AD 1000/1100-1450/1470) transformed in response to Inca imperialism (AD 1450-1532) in the Moche Valley of Peru. Recent discoveries of hundreds of sacrificial victims in the Moche Valley suggest that ritual violence was used to maintain the sociopolitical and religious agendas of elites ruling from the nearby capital city Chan Chan. Numerous archaeological investigations on the north coast of Peru have shown that while the Inca maintained political and economic control of the region, sacrifices originally performed by the Chimú endured despite Inca conquest. Using archaeological, osteological, and stable isotope analyses of multiple human tissues, this project reconstructs the treatment, geographic origins, and diets of human sacrifices from the sites of El Pollo and Pampa la Cruz to explore whether sacrificial rituals changed following the formation of the Chimú Empire and in response to Inca sociopolitical integration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36001.0