3130 Archaeology and Society Final Exam

Hand in to me in Vari 2036, or to the Anthropology Department at Vari Hall 2054.

Submission: The exam is due Friday December 14 before 2 pm. Either hand it to me directly at Vari 2036 (I’ll be there from 12 until 2 pm), or to the Anthro Dept., Vari Hall 2054. • Email attachments will not be accepted. • Do not slide your assignment under a door. If the office is closed, use my secure drop box to the right of the Anthro Dept door at Vari 2054. • Late exams will be penalized 15% per day or part thereof, including weekends, unless a medical or counsellor’s note is provided. There can be no lenience with the late penalty.

General marking criteria include the clarity, thoughtfulness, and accuracy of your writing, the quality of your consultation of this course’s material, and your demonstrated comprehension of that material. You are expected to show understanding of the themes of the course, reasonable mastery of the content, and critical thinking.

Matters of form – such as correct answer format, spelling, clear and technically correct writing, proper referencing, and adherence to the length limit – will also be evaluated. Therefore, proofread your work carefully to ensure that there are no errors in spelling or grammar, and that your discussion unfolds logically and clearly. Check that you represented your sources accurately, and that you referenced fully. Give yourself adequate time to check and revise your work before submission… and to get it printed out in time.

Consult the course readings and your notes. You are not being marked for general opinions, but for your understanding of the material covered in this course, and your ability to use it in answering these questions. You must refer to material covered in this course, and do so specifically and meaningfully. Be specific in your allusions to course content (texts, lectures), and fully reference your answer. You may examine some additional sources if you wish, but it is not necessary, and you are advised to keep further research minimal.

Please note: Although you may certainly choose to address ethically difficult topics about which you feel strongly, refrain from simplistic moral judgements — e.g. “selling artifacts is bad”, “blowing up monuments is evil”, “megadams are terrible”, “capitalism is awful”, “prejudice is wrong”, “religion is good/bad” — and instead provide a more scholarly analysis of the situation. • Resist generalizations about groups of people, e.g. lumping all indigenous people, all tourists, all looters, or all archaeologists, together.

Plagiarism will not be tolerated, whether intentional or unintentional. You may of course speak to each other about the questions, but actual collaboration on your written answers will be noted as plagiarism and will not be tolerated. Obviously, the work submitted must be your own. It is also your responsibility to cite correctly.

Citation and Bibliography. You must cite the sources of your information, and enclose words in quotation marks if they are taken from another author. For all information cited or quoted, you must include a full reference in the bibliography. Review the course handout “Using Sources Correctly in Your Paper” and follow the instructions there. (You may also consult this site for information: www.yorku.ca/kdenning/+AllCourses/anthroref.htm ) For website citation, follow this format: • Author's name if available – look for it! • Date of publication or update • Title or description of document • Title of complete work in italics • Other relevant information (volume number, page numbers, etc.) • ‘Retrieved on Dec xx, 2007’ • Complete and correct URL for the web PAGE used, not just for the entire website. To cite 3130 lecture notes, give the author (Denning), URL and the date.

Required Formatting. Double space between lines. Use 11 pt or 12 pt font. Leave margins of at least 1 inch. Number your pages. (Handwritten numbers are fine.) Staple your paper through one corner.

è Title page, with your name, student number, Prof's name, course number, word count (should be close to but not exceeding 2500 words, not including bibliography), the date, and the number of pages.

è Question 2. Formal case study analysis. Target length 1250 words. Worth 50% of exam.

è Bibliography, providing full references for all sources used.

The Bonus is optional.

Required Style: Informal Essay. Target: 1250 words. N.B. This should be very clear prose for a general audience. Carefully consult literature we have covered in the course. (Include references for me, but do not assume that your audience will have read them.)

You have landed a summer internship working on an online newsletter for York University students. Your editor says, “Lots of people are really interested in old stuff, so write an article about something to do with archaeology. But don’t tell me about new developments in radiocarbon dating or the sort of stuff that only archaeologists care about… I want you to write about how archaeology connects to society. Maybe about what’s happening with ancient sites, or artifacts, international issues, tourism, buying artifacts, controversies, something like that.” So… write the article!

As you plan your answer, consider: What do you think is most important for your fellow York students to know about archaeology and society? Hint: Carefully consider the ideas or themes discussed in the course, not just individual case studies. Optional: If you wish to use up-to-date news items in archaeology as raw material to incorporate into your feature article, consult www.archaeology.org/online/news/headlines.html .

Required Style: Formal Essay. Target: 1250 words. N.B. This should be an academic analysis. Cite literature we have covered in the course, as well as the sources specifically mentioned below.

Recall the film, Frozen in Heaven, about children sacrificed centuries ago by the Inca. (If you missed the video, that’s okay — the transcript will provide enough information. The transcript of the video, and optional supplementary resources are here: www.yorku.ca/kdenning/3130exam.htm ) As shown in that video, modern archaeologists have been excavating the children from their mountain-top shrines, supported by organizations such as National Geographic. Now, a museum has been built to display them. This is a controversial move, as discussed in the two news articles below (Propriety and History Clash in Argentina, and Protest over Child Mummies). Review the transcript online and read the two articles attached. What are the different viewpoints concerning the excavation and display of the children? What are the premises underlying those viewpoints, about ownership and appropriate uses of the past… whose past is it? Discuss the issues carefully, with reference to themes and texts discussed in the course. You may support one position over the issues if you wish, but it is not necessary to take a side: it is sufficient to carefully discuss the issues. (Note: Impassioned emotional remarks are permissible, but are not a substitute for analysis.)

Write an original poem or short story, or create an original work of art on a theme concerning archaeology and society.

NOTE: If you submit a work of art, please clearly label it with your name, and indicate whether you would like it returned, discarded, or whether you would be willing for it to be displayed in the future by the Anthro Department. (Your choice will not affect your grade!) If you choose “display”, please also indicate whether you would like it to be displayed anonymously or with your name. If you choose “return”, please include your email address and telephone number.

Propriety and History Clash in Argentina: Museum's Plans to Exhibit Mummified Incan Children Upsets Indigenous Groups, Others

SALTA, Argentina -- Their facial features are clear, and their muscles are firm. The blood remains frozen in their veins, and the vivid clothes they wore the day they died remain intact.

The three Incan children -- believed to be victims of a mountaintop sacrifice about 500 years ago -- are among the best-preserved mummies ever found, and Argentine officials hope to put them on display this fall in a museum in this city in the far north.

But not everyone is looking forward to the public unveiling of human remains that look anything but ancient. Members of an Argentine indigenous organization are trying to legally block the display, saying it dishonors their "little brothers and sisters." Rival museum officials in Buenos Aires dismiss the exhibit as morbid. And the explorer who discovered the bodies six years ago worries that a rushed showing could permanently damage them.

"I'd much prefer that they not be displayed, just because of all of the headaches," said Johan Reinhard, who lives in Arlington and is an explorer in residence for the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the expedition.

Reinhard and his team of mountaineering archaeologists found the three bodies, along with dozens of Incan artifacts, atop the 22,000-foot Llullaillaco peak near the Argentine border with Chile, about 200 miles west of here.

The corpses -- two girls and a boy believed to range in age from about 6 to 15 -- were not artificially mummified, but preserved naturally by the combination of freezing temperatures, thin air and moderate humidity. No signs of violence were found; scientists suspect the three were simply left to freeze to death on a funerary platform as sacrificial gifts to an ancient mountain god.

After National Geographic's one-year exclusivity rights to the mummies and artifacts expired, the Argentine government took possession of them. Officials decided to open an Inca-themed museum in Salta to display the finds and inaugurated the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology last November in a remodeled 19th-century Victorian building bordering the city's central square.

The museum currently exhibits the collection of artifacts -- including gold and silver statues, textiles and pottery -- and hopes to unveil a mummy exhibit for its one-year anniversary on Nov. 19, charging tourists about $3 to enter. The museum plans to show the mummies in rotation, one at a time.

"Whether it was right or wrong to take the mummies from the mountain, I don't know," said Gabriel Miremont, the museum's director. "But we now have them, so we have a choice: leave them in a laboratory with a small group of scientists, or share them with society. I think it's more democratic to give everyone the opportunity to see them."

Since taking possession of the corpses, the museum has solicited the support of several local indigenous leaders. Miremont said they were skeptical at first but changed their minds after assurances that the exhibit would honor the dead, not exploit them.

But the country's first and largest association of native tribes strongly opposes the exhibit, and its president said last week that the group's lawyers have begun the process of trying to prevent the display from opening. He said he would like to see the mummies returned to the mountain.

"These children have been taken violently from their sacred resting places, and we consider this an attack on our people," said Rogelio Guanuco, president of the Indigenous Association of Argentina, which says it represents 65 percent of the country's 868 native communities. "The desire to show them is something we consider even worse, because it turns something spiritual into something commercial."

It isn't clear exactly where the children lived before making the arduous trek to the mountaintop, which makes it difficult to determine which modern native group can claim the right to speak for them. Reinhard said the children might have traveled with an entourage from Chile to the Argentine mountain peak -- a possibility that would add jurisdictional complexities.

Because not all native cultures considered their sacrificial dead as untouchable, sacred objects, the uncertainty of origin also clouds the ethical debate.

"They buried these, but we know that they also periodically brought some others out for display, to be honored publicly," said Reinhard, whose previous high-altitude expeditions uncovered 18 sets of human remains.

His most famous discovery was the mummified Peruvian "ice maiden" known as Juanita, a pre-Columbian teenager apparently also sacrificed to the Inca gods on a mountaintop. When Juanita was displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington in 1996, President Bill Clinton joked that she was so attractive, "If I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out."

Increasingly, experts favor keeping human remains under wraps, particularly if they belong to native groups. In recent years, many museums throughout the world have returned -- or "repatriated" -- human artifacts to native groups that have requested them. The National Museum of Natural History, for example, has to date repatriated about 3,300 Native American remains and 88,000 funerary objects, according to its Web site.

Jose Antonio Perez Gollan, director of the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Buenos Aires, is among the officials who have publicly called for repatriation of the Salta mummies. Putting remains on display panders to the worst instincts of the morbidly curious, he said, and offers little educational value.

"I don't think this is the way to try to learn about indigenous cultures," Gollan said. "It doesn't help at all."

When visitors view the mummies, they will look through a window into a chamber that aims to replicate the exact atmospheric conditions of the mountain -- a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit, 45 percent humidity and very little light and oxygen. Workers are still putting the finishing touches on the windows, but Miremont is hopeful they will meet the November target date.

Reinhard, who heads a scientific consulting group formed to oversee the work, said the museum has proceeded with design plans without input of his committee. He said he was worried that the chamber and the viewing windows will not be properly tested before the public debut. It can take years for a very small change in atmosphere to be detected if there is even a very minor leak, he said, by which time irreparable damage can be done.

"It's very, very easy to run into problems with displays," Reinhard said in a telephone interview. "The preservation of these mummies is incredible -- there's nothing else like them in the world. So much care has gone into them . . . it would be a shame if that came to a stop now."

But that doesn't mean he opposes the exhibit on ethical grounds. He said he believes viewing mummies can help people make profound connections with cultures they never really considered before, and that such strong links can have an immeasurable educational value.

"There's nothing quite like the authenticity that comes with seeing a real person," Reinhard said. "You can have a replica displayed, but it just doesn't have that same emotional power."

They are the most perfectly preserved mummies in the world - their skin so intact that they look practically alive, their clothes still bright and new, the remains of their last meal still undigested inside their stomachs.

But plans to put on display the remains of three 500-year-old Inca children have run into resistance from Argentinian indigenous groups who consider the project an insult to their ancestors and even some scientists who have expressed misgivings about the project.

The mummies were found in 1999 by a National Geographic team on the 22,000-foot (6,700m) peak of Llullaillaco, a mountain in the Andes between Argentina and Chile. The three children, two girls and a boy aged between six and 15, were left on the peak to freeze to death in the 15th century, shortly before the arrival of Spanish colonists in America, apparently as a human sacrifice. But a combination of high altitude, low oxygen and humidity levels as well as zero-degree temperatures has produced a near-miraculous preservation.

The mummified remains are to go on display at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Argentina's Salta province in November, and are expected to become a big tourist attraction. But opposition to the plan is growing.

Particularly outraged is the head of Argentina's indigenous association, Rogelio Guanuco, who represents 70% of the country's 868 indigenous communities, and refers to the three mummies as "our children".

"This is a violation of our loved ones," he said. "Our ancestors taught us our sacred places should not be touched. Llullaillaco continues to be sacred for us. They should never have profaned that sanctuary, and they should not put our children on exhibition as if in a circus."

Gabriel Miremont, the director of the Salta museum where the mummies will be displayed, has defended the project. "The disagreement comes from other tribes, but not from the Quechuas here in Salta, who are working jointly with us on this project," he said. "We provide the scientific support, but they will be in charge of the tribal rituals which will be performed here at the museum. They consider our museum a shrine."

"Today it is no longer considered ethical to put human remains on display," said Argentina's national museums director, Americo Castilla, who has no jurisdiction over provincial museums such as the one in Salta. Argentinian museums have adopted a policy of returning human remains to indigenous tribes.

Argentinian archaeologist Gustavo Politis, who has been at the forefront of the restitution of human remains to indigenous communities, is opposed. "The Llullaillaco children should not be displayed because that would affect the feelings of our ancestors," he said. "The display of mummies is one of the worst faces of archaeology."

SPONSOR: Tonight, on NOVA, high atop an Andean summit, a little boy's frozen body reveals dark secrets of a lost culture. Did the Inca sacrifice their children to appease the gods? Now, a NOVA team returns to an ancient burial ground to unearth the answer. What mysteries lie frozen in heaven?

NARRATOR: Rising high above the South American continent, the Andes seem untouched by earthly struggles. But their pristine, ice-capped peaks are haunted by a dark secret: a deadly mountaintop ritual. These frozen bodies—all children—date to the time of the Inca—the great civilization that ruled the Andes 500 years ago. How they died has remained shrouded in mystery. Now, a new kind of scientist—part scholar, part adventurer—is unlocking the secrets of the ancient mummies. Anthropologist Johan Reinhard has spent nearly two decades exploring Andean peaks.

JOHAN REINHARD: For about sixteen years I've done research on people's beliefs about mountains in the Andes because it's like a key to understanding a lot of parts of Andean cosmology, religion.

NARRATOR: Today, Johan begins a climb to the top of Sara Sara, a giant volcano in southern Peru. When he first climbed the mountain in 1983, Johan found the ruins of ancient walls on the summit. He hoped to excavate the site, but never got the chance. Violent weather and terrorism prevented his return for more than 13 years. Now that the strife has subsided, Johan is mounting an expedition to Sara Sara, along with a team of Peruvian archaeologists. Joining them are residents of Quilcata, the town at the base of the mountain. Like their Inca ancestors, the villagers believe that Sara Sara has supernatural powers. The mountains are held to govern the weather, commanding the course of the clouds and bringing life-giving rain. If the mountain god fails to provide, disaster will follow. But was the Incas' fear of these deities so great, they would sacrifice their children to appease them? The Incas had no written language, so much of what we know about them comes from chronicles written by the Spanish who conquered the Inca Empire in the 16th century. These rare drawings depicting Inca life are the work of a descendant of Inca nobility who grew up under Spanish rule. When the conquistadors landed in 1532, the Incas were at the height of their power. Their kingdom, stretching from Ecuador to Chile, rivaled the size of the Roman Empire. Like the Romans, the Incas were innovative engineers. Undaunted by vertical terrain, they built majestic mountaintop retreats like Machu Picchu. Their distinctive, imperial style was everywhere, from their architecture, to their intricately woven fabrics. Bill Conklin is an Inca scholar specializing in textiles. He believes that one of the key ingredients in the Incas' success was their unique attitude toward conquest.

WILLIAM CONKLIN: The Inca were a cleverly imperial people. They were on the one hand a military empire, but they accomplished a lot of their conquering by persuasion. They were enormously clever at confronting tribes that were alien initially, offering to worship their deities, incorporate them into the Inca kingdom, let them join the brotherhood so to speak.

NARRATOR: One ancient Andean tradition that the Incas embraced was mountain worship.

CONKLIN: The people of the Andes previous to the Incas did worship mountains, but in a different way. They seemed to have worshipped mountains from a distance, but the Incas are the ones who got the idea of climbing this ladder to heaven and going up to the top of the mountain and actually engaging in their ritual practices at that spot which must have been their concept of heaven.

NARRATOR: While still on the lower slopes of Sara Sara, Johan's team discovers evidence of ancient mountain worship. It's in a cave, thousands of feet below the summit.

WALTER DIAZ: We've found metal artifacts along with some ceramics. From the ceramics, we think these are from the Wari culture. Further studies will determine the meaning of all this. We've also found human skulls, as well as animal remains.

NARRATOR: The finds are intriguing, but they're not Inca. They were probably left by the Wari, a culture that flourished in Peru 500 years before the Inca. On his last trip, Johan saw Inca ruins 1000 feet higher up.

REINHARD: There's an Inca site that's out of the way. It's what we're talking about doing is sending the burros up ahead with some gear and some of us splitting off and heading on over to take a look at the Inca site.

NARRATOR: Sara Sara is over 150 miles south of Cuzco, the Inca capital, but according to a Spanish chronicle, it was among the most venerated mountains in the empire. Johan hopes the ruins will help him confirm the mountain's prominence.

REINHARD: We're at 15,200 feet, about 220 feet and we're at a hill top which has been a whole series of structures built. They look to be clearly Inca, some with walls up to about a meter and a half, about 5 feet high. The number of the structures and the layout indicates that this was a staging point on the way up to the summit of Sara Sara.

NARRATOR: Johan's partner on the expedition is Doctor Jose Antonio Chavez, an archeologist from the Catholic University in Arequipa.

ANTONIO CHAVEZ: We are in two very important, large rooms here and nearby are a couple of small corrals. There are also living quarters probably for the people who fetched and carried material such as wood for the ascent of the Sara Sara volcano.

NARRATOR: The complex appears to be a huge staging area used by the Incas on their journeys up the mountain.

REINHARD: What we see here up in the background is the western northern summit. There's one we can't see just in the back where the ruins are located, but clearly to us anyway it looks like the Incas would have gone up perhaps that scree slope or perhaps up this ridge, then up that scree slope to get to the summit and it's one of the few routes of access that you can get on this mountain because it's quite steep all the way round.

NARRATOR: Johan's interest in Sara Sara was sparked in part by intriguing references in the Spanish Chronicles. But was Peru's past accurately portrayed in the invaders' accounts? Sonia Guillen is one of Peru's leading experts on mummified bodies. She has spent years studying the continents of exposed graves in the vast coastal desert of southern Peru. Like many other investigators, she is highly suspicious of the Spanish chronicles.

SONIA GUILLEN: You have to take chronicles with, with a grain of salt. You, you, there're chroniclers and chroniclers, they're the ones that were closer to, to, to the events. Those are the ones that heard about it, they, they were not close to them. They also had their own intentions. Some of the chroniclers, for example, were sent to destroy the religious activity of the Indians. They made sure that they looked like pagan people. That led to the belief that the priests were exaggerating in their presentation of rituals.

NARRATOR: Accounts of one Inca ceremony in particular seemed exaggerated: capa cocha—a mysterious ritual in which the Incas sacrificed their children to the mountain gods.

GUILLEN: The capa cocha ritual was always presented as very bloody and, and very unchristian.

NARRATOR: The descriptions were so grotesque, the scholars doubted the ceremony actually took place.

CONKLIN: Although the evidence for capa cocha has been there in the Spanish chroniclers for years, nobody paid much attention to it until the discovery of frozen bodies which suddenly makes the whole subject real.

NARRATOR: Deep in the bowels of a museum in Chile, a translucent coffin holds evidence that suggesting capa cocha was all too real. Found on a mountaintop in 1954, he's been locked in a freezer ever since. The frozen body of a young boy. He died 500 years ago—a child of the Inca. They named him the El Plomo boy, for the peak where he was discovered. Dr. Silvia Quevedo Kawasaki leads the team of conservationists which is struggling to keep the child as well preserved in the lab as he was in his icy tomb.

KAWASAKI: We do this every 5 or 10 years, but we haven't done it since 1985. This little piece I'm removing will be sent away for analysis in order to calculate humidity. He has a characteristic smell caused by changes in body fat. Although it's a strong, penetrating smell, it's a good one. As doctors we're guided by smells, by touch, by sensitivity. Everything available to us is a valid resource. Sometimes, the smell tells us his condition. And in this case, it's good.

NARRATOR: The El Plomo boy was well adorned with exquisite Inca textiles and jewelry, all perfectly preserved. Found with him was an array of artifacts, including small pouches containing his baby teeth and nail clippings. There was a gold llama, and a distinctive silver figurine. These were all classic Inca offerings to the gods. And so, it seems, was the boy. He was a capa cocha sacrifice.

KAWASAKI: To me, he's an exceptional human being. He still embodies all the energy of the people who went with up the mountains to sacrifice him to the gods. You can still see it—the energy in him. His face looks very peaceful. He passed from sleep to death without realizing it.

NARRATOR: A gentile death—in stark contrast to the Spaniards' gruesome descriptions. Now that actual evidence was emerging, Inca attitudes toward human sacrifice had to be thoroughly reexamined.

REINHARD: What the Incas did is very different from a lot of societies where you did human sacrifice. They weren't doing it wholesale, for example, like the Aztecs were, or eating some of the victims. They were quite the contrary, was a whole different concept. You had the parents of the children actually get involved in many cases. We know that. And it was an honor to have your child be selected.

NARRATOR: The children chosen for sacrifice were said to be perfect—In death, they would be deified.

REINHARD: Children were considered to be pure. Your pre-puberty child still hadn't gotten the sins of the adults so that they viewed it as one of the best emissaries to the deities.

NARRATOR: The Spanish described in detail the ceremonies leading up to the sacrifice.

CONKLIN: The children were brought to Cuzco, their capital, and they were paraded or marched to these mountaintops across the country, in some cases hundred of miles. They walked apparently in straight lines up and down the mountain tops in a very formal ritual procession with songs and ceremonies involved all the way, until the final moment up at the top of the mountain when the child was sacrificed and the burial then occurred.

NARRATOR: The frozen mountaintop preserved forever elements of the ceremony, including evidence of the child's long journey.

KAWASAKI: His feet show signs of having walked a long way. One foot is callused, and both feet are swollen. Also his fingers are frost-bitten -this is very significant. It means he was alive when he reached his destination.

REINHARD: Over the last four decades, many archaeologists have tried to find other capa cocha children. Most have come up empty handed. Then, in 1995, Johan Reinhard discovered a frozen girl—the first ever found—on Mount Ampato, in Peru. Nicknamed Juanita, this five hundred year old mummy is amazingly well preserved. When she went on display in Washington D.C., thousands flocked to see her. Juanita's popularity helped Johan fund further research, including his return to Sara Sara. He and his teammates have been working their way up to the slopes for three days now. At 18,000 feet, the air is very thin. Every step is an effort. Reaching the summit brings little relief... On this expedition, the hardest part isn't the climb, but the digging—through several feet of rock and solid ice.

REINHARD: Well it's looking very snowy. The concern now is just how deep the snow is because we're going to have to obviously clear it. We're hopeful that this part is still intact because you can see the edge here, so that this hasn't been hopefully excavated. We'll find out when we clear the snow. I'm going down further here. This, from 1983 this section of the wall has collapsed and the concern could be that this would be, have been due to some looting or digging in here. We won't know until we excavate. It could also just be natural, you know I mean it's been quite awhile, it's 13 years, and the depth of the walls is pretty clear when you start looking down here. It's about, it's almost 2 meters there and as you go around this is all part of the wall here that we're seeing. Comes out around here, it's about 2 meters right down here. It's over 6 feet, so they went to a lot of work to make this broad area, put in fill. Imagine the amount of loads they must have taken from around here to, to fill this all in.

NARRATOR: The summit of Sara Sara is a huge complex of man-made platforms, shaped by stone retaining walls and filled with gravel. Johan is standing on the lower of the two main terraces, visible only as stone circles above the snow. On the opposite northern side, a collection of boulders marks a small platform. To the east, a series of four terraces runs down between rocky outcrops. Johan believes the southern end holds the most promise.

REINHARD: Where we're standing right now is on one of the south-eastern corners and one of the deepest corners and that's generally the deepest places is where you usually find something, so we could be right now standing on top of potentially a human sacrifice, but certainly some kind of offerings I would think would be in this section right here.

NARRATOR: Was this the last sight seen by a child 500 years ago? The Incas intended their offerings to last for eternity. But in less than 100 years, Catholic monks were retracing the children's footsteps with a very different aim.

GUILLEN: The Spanish came here to indoctrinate the natives, so they, they had this very solace purpose of changing their pagan ways. Part of that implied destroying their gods and destroying their shrines, making sure all those beliefs would disappear.

NARRATOR: The monks didn't merely record Inca traditions: they also did their best to uproot them. They hunted down and destroyed anything sacred to the culture, including the bodies of capa cocha children.

GUILLEN: In a way you could say that they succeeded because everybody here became, in the Andes, became Christian. They accepted the, the, the coming religion, but, but they also didn't succeed because the Andean traditions were so strong that eventually they, they merged with some of the Christian beliefs. There, there's this level in which some of the local gods just got different names so I don't think the Vatican would recognize what's being practiced here as what they would expect the Catholic religion to be.

ARCADIO MAMANI: This ceremony is carried out when you want to ask the mountain for something good. in this case, we're asking the mountain to protect us. Help us in everything we do, so that we should not suffer any misfortune. This is a way of achieving harmony with the mountain.

NARRATOR: Before digging, Johan's team makes a traditional offering to the mountain of llama fetuses.

REINHARD: The llama fetus represents like the entire llama and, but it's the essence of the llama. In Andean beliefs, you can have things that are very small, but since they have been ritually invoked, they, they have all the essence of the entire thing and when you offer it you're offering the entire animal. Fetuses are believed to be a favorite food of the mountain deities so they're very pleased when they get these. Through time, you begin to see the mountains in a different way, you begin to see them just like the villagers do. They say they're alive and for you they come alive in a certain way because you're beginning to see how they view them.

NARRATOR: On the summit, the mountain seems reluctant to yield its secrets. The team must chop through six feet of 500 year old gravel—now frozen rock hard. Every spare container is commandeered for boiling snow, to help soften the ground.

REINHARD: Where water really comes important in a sense not so much here—just can't make that much of a dent in this kind of frost. When it comes in really important is when you find some artifact or among the and then you can work around it carefully, or even sometimes they're frozen rock hard into the ice, a mixture of rock and ice, and you can melt, you know melt it around it and free it without damaging the textiles.

NARRATOR: Hacking through the frozen gravel is exhausting labor. The air contains about half the oxygen found at sea level, so each worker can swing his pick only a few times before stopping to catch his breath.

REINHARD: It's inevitable during the course of dealing with hard terrain like this that some time you're going to actually hit an object and fortunately that's happened very rarely and usually what you get is a bit of textile or a bit of material, straw or something like that which gives an indication of something there and then work almost stops and you start working very carefully and then you free it up. But imagine let's say just there was a statue right there.

NARRATOR: But there's no need to imagine a find—in a matter of hours, Jose Antonio Chavez spots the real thing—A silver Inca shawl pin lying on the surface of the ground. Soon he finds five similar pins. None are buried.

CHAVEZ: These are shawl pins, probably silver. They were used as clasps for clothing or cloaks. It depended on the wearer. Usually women wore them. They are a well known feature of the Inca world. We found them lying on the surface and I assume they were part of some sacrifice that took place. But we haven't found anything else nearby.

NARRATOR: Although this shows the site was used by the Incas, it could be bad news for the archaeologists. The Incas usually buried their offerings. Artifacts found on the surface often mean another sort of excavation has taken place. It's a problem afflicting every archaeological site in Peru, looters. An ancient cemetery near where Sonia Guillen works is a typical example.

GUILLEN: In this area we have very good preservation of organic material and this is what the looters expose. Unfortunately this has been greatly destroyed by the activity of looters looking for pottery, textiles and, and hopefully they, they did expect to find some gold. Because of some superstitions, when they find the mummy they will take the head away violently and throw it away and separate it from the body. Looters, looters are grave robbers and they're thieves you know, they're destroying evidence that should be important for them, for themselves, and they're—This is a resource that like any type of resource is, it will end you know, the more they destroy the more we will have less to study, less to protect, less to show in museums, less to keep for generations to come, so they are our worst enemy for any type of, not just the scientific work that needs to be done, but the protection of our heritage.

NARRATOR: The looters, also known as huaqeros, will go to any lengths to find capa cocha burials.

CONKLIN: The only advantage that the burials have is that they are at such remote locations and so inaccessible but of course the fame and world-wide publicity associated with this undoubtedly inspires the huaqueros and the diggers to climb to the mountain tops and dig for their portion of the gold and the rewards that they can find there.

REINHARD: There's hardly any mountain top that has not been looted, including this one. Unfortunately there has been use of dynamite that have exploded bodies. Once I even pulled out to my amazement an ear from a wall at 20,000 feet, so it was exploded by people who wanted to get at the artifacts.

NARRATOR: The threat of looting heightens the team's resolve to find and conserve Inca burial sites. But now it seems this site may disappoint them. After several fruitless days, Jose decides to give up digging on the north side. Johan perseveres, and at last, there's a glimmer of hope: a layer of grass buried within the main, southern platform.

REINHARD: What we've hit at about 50 centimeters is some nice batch of what they call Ichu. It's a wild grass and some pieces of wood. That's a good indication that we're on the right track. You wouldn't find this kind of thing unless there was some kind of offering that they were making.

NARRATOR: Grass and trees don't grow at this altitude, so they must have been carried up the mountain, probably by the Incas.

NARRATOR: The site looks more promising, but not the weather. A fierce lightning storm suddenly sweeps over the summit. Everyone scrambles down to camp, 500 feet below. The storm is a sobering reminder of the violent forces that lurk about the mountain. It was this kind of power which struck fear into the hearts of the Incas—and moved them to appease the mountain gods with gifts. One of those gifts is kept here in a freezer in Argentina. The body of a young boy, one of only a handful of well-preserved capa cocha children ever found. He was discovered in 1985 on Mount Aconagua, the tallest peak in the Western Hemisphere. The top of his head was damaged by exposure, but the rest is almost perfectly preserved. Although the El Plomo boy from Chile appeared to have died peacefully, the final moments of the Aconcagua boy were different.

JUAN SCHOBINGER: We found in his intestines some liquid that the child ingested. With the help of chemical and other analysis, we concluded that the last food consumed by the child was a liquid containing the red color of achiote, a color symbolizing life.

CARLOS DE CICCO: Achiote is a vegetable product, very similar to saffron in its chemical properties and color. It was found in the vomit which can still be seen on the teeth. They are stained a reddish color as a result of the vomit.

NARRATOR: The clothes he was wearing were covered in vomit and diarrhea, both stained red by the achiote dye.

DE CICCO: The child must have realized that he was about to be sacrificed on one of the highest burial grounds in the world. So during the ceremony the child must have been very distressed. I suppose the diarrhea and vomiting which the child suffered in his final moments were the result of this state of stress. These loose stools show the child was, I think, very, very frightened—absolutely terrified.

NARRATOR: No one can know for certain what this young child felt in his final moments, but clearly, he was physically ill. Exhaustion and high altitude could have contributed to his nausea. But his death was far from natural. The seven-year old was so tightly wrapped in textiles that his ribs were broken, his pelvis dislocated. The life was literally squeezed out of him. Was this the norm for capa cocha? Were the Spanish right when they described a violent ritual? The discovery of Juanita provided new opportunities to investigate. Many of the tourists who visit Juanita comment on her calm, almost saint-like air. But during her trip to Washington, the mummy was CAT scanned by an advanced 3D imaging system at Johns Hopkins University. The test revealed a darker secret behind the serene expression.

ELLIOT FISHMAN: This image is an image of her skull looking directly at us and the first thing you can see is her orbits. The eye socket, the left orbit is nice and round, it's perfectly normal. The right orbit is kind of compressed and you can look at the lateral wall and there's actually a fracture. If we then rotate this image and you can see this line in her frontal bone which is evidence of a skull fracture. It's a fairly significant fracture and if you look at both of these together it's a type of evidence that someone who is struck by a hard blow on the side of the head, maybe by a rock or by a stick or by a club, and basically bled internally and that's how she died.

NARRATOR: Research on Juanita is just beginning. Scientists hope her internal organs, as well as the textiles and offerings found with her, will reveal more about what kind of life she led. DNA analysis of her frozen flesh may help determine what part of the Inca empire she came from. Juanita was a great discovery for Johan, yet something was missing, her tomb. Landslides on Mount Ampato destroyed her ceremonial burial place, and Juanita rolled 200 feet down the mountain. The perfect capa cocha burial; is yet to be found, and Johan suspects it may be hidden somewhere on Sara Sara. So far, there are no signs of the coveted ancient grave site. After five days, the team has found nothing more than the shawl pins. Then, an archaeological student, Walter Diaz, spots something in his small patch of gravel.

DIAZ: The first thing I noticed was a little piece of textile and what might be hairs. I don't know what kind of hair. It might be llama or guinea pig. But here you can see the little piece of red fabric. Look, it's a statuette.

REINHARD: It's a male, you call from the top. Because of the flat head just from here I can tell that it's a male. You can see the textiles starting to come around, see around the body.

NARRATOR: What Walter has found is a tiny silver statue wrapped in textiles, a classic capa cocha offering. As they clear the earth away, the workers find a second silver statue, a female, the same design as the one found with the El Plomo boy.

REINHARD: There's probably a lot more offerings in the nooks and crannies around here. The mountain was extremely sacred for the Incas and the people in this entire region. Over the years you're bound to get a number of offerings.

NARRATOR: Sure enough, as Walter digs deeper, a gold figurine emerges from the soil.

DIAZ: It's probably a gold vicuna. Usually we find silver or gold llamas. This time it is something different. Possibly, it is a vicuna.

NARRATOR: Next is a figurine carved from a seashell, once as valuable to the Incas as gold.

DIAZ: It's a tiny llama figure made from a spondylus shell. That's a marine mollusc found in Ecuador, north of Peru.

NARRATOR: Seashell miniatures, and gold and silver statuettes, were offered to the gods along with the capa cocha children. Although the shawl pins were found to the north, Walter's statues came out of a small rock crevice high on the summit.

REINHARD: What's ironic is this is a teeny little platform. Those were huge platforms we have on the other side we haven't found anything yet, but that's probably because it's steeper. You have a small platform like this and you have a better chance of finding something quickly because it's shallow.

NARRATOR: Then, finally, a tantalizing find over the cover on the main platform. A small silver rod glints within the ice.

REINHARD: What they just uncovered here is a silver llama figurine, you just see a bit of it here. Beautifully preserved and what's really exciting to us is that just below this, some of this straw and robe and we had thought there might be a burial here and here we see this hole, in other words we're seeing ice which means there's a hole there and with this llama figurine in front of it. It's quite possible that we will find a human sacrifice here when we continue digging.

NARRATOR: Johan hopes this tiny llama is a sign of more exciting things to come.

NARRATOR: While the male and female statues were found in a crevice above the main platform, the silver llama was unearthed close to the stop where Johan expected to find a mummy. Hopes are high that more digging will reveal the focus of all the offerings, the body of a child. But as the days pass, only Walter's small rock crevice yields more artifacts, seven in all, including a beautiful gold male statue. The ice hole on the main platform is a disappointment. Hours of hacking and pouring hot water reveal nothing but more grass. Time on the mountain is running out. The team has been here for nine days. Supplies are low, and everyone is feeling the effects of the altitude. Desperate to make the most of what little time remains, team members launch small excavations all over the summit. Amazingly, one of them, on the eastern side, pays off.

CHAVEZ: Since yesterday we've had a hunch we'd find something. Jose Luis had already discovered a small offering. So, we started to clean this area and we found the walls of a tomb.

NARRATOR: The pungent stench of decomposing flesh attracts other team members. As Jose scrapes away the gravel, they find themselves staring into the face of a small mummy.

REINHARD: We've smelled it before. That's why I thought there was a mummy here even before they found it. And that means usually it's already decomposed to a degree so what we're getting there are going to be textiles which looks like there's still some textiles left, although damaged and a skeleton, but the nice thing is we'll get the whole complex and we'll get in and situated and we get all different artifacts. You can already see a statue here. There's going to be others when they found the silver statue right here, so there's going to be more stuff that's going to be found in association with it, and that's the kind of things that really make this exciting.

NARRATOR: To Johan, the discovery is proof that the Incas used Sara-Sara for child sacrifice. The complete grave will help the archaeologists paint a clearer picture of this ancient ritual. The mummy was buried in the terraces east of the main platform. Since these face the morning sun, the ground here is not frozen, and the body will most likely be degraded. As the mud is removed, it's clear the whole bundle is wrapped in sac-like textiles.

DIAZ: What we have here is part of the head. The mummy is pointing downwards. These are the feet and part of the body. And possibly above the knee is a small offering which we can see here.

NARRATOR: Even though the caked mud, a glimmer of color is visible, fine stripes on 500 year old Inca cloth.

DIAZ: The shawl pin goes through the cloak. The head is covered by another piece of cloth, but the shawl pin goes underneath that cloth and here it is.

REINHARD: Where he's working right now shows a tupu, a shawl pin, which means that this is a female mummy.

NARRATOR: Another girl who lost her life to the mountain gods. She was found just in time, the team can't afford to stay on the mountain any longer. But Johan is determined to return. He's convinced that Sara Sara harbors many more invaluable finds.

REINHARD: There's been some looting, but there's also a tremendous amount that hasn't been touched and it's very, very exciting really with a lot of different, smaller sites and we still have quite a bit of work ahead of us to get to the bottom of it. We'll give some thought to how to make this a more efficient operation when we come back next year.

NARRATOR: Still partly frozen and caked in the dirt, the mummy is carried down to the village below, where she is nicknamed "Sarita" after the great mountain which claimed her life. Back at the Catholic University in Arequipa, Jose Antonio Chavez leads the team of conservationalists who will care for the mummy. Their first step is to painstakingly thaw, separate, and refreeze several layers of textiles. As the team peels away the coverings, startling discoveries come to light. A large pouch made of feathers hangs down the girl's back. It probably contained the coca leaves. On the mountain, the archaeologists though the tiny body belonged to an eight or nine year old. Now, examination of her teeth show she was actually about fifteen. Unlike some of the other mummies, which were dressed in royal Inca garb, Sarita died wearing very ordinary, everyday clothing. Still, she was clearly a capa cocha sacrifice. X-rays of her skull reveal that, like Juanita, Sarita was killed by a severe blow to the head. Each new discovery is providing more information for anthropologists, as they struggle to untangle the dark mysteries of capa cocha. These were the chosen ones, offered up by their communities to please the emperor and the mountain gods. Laden with offerings, they journeyed to sacred peaks throughout the Inca empire. The children climbed higher than they had ever gone before, to windblown spires of ice and rock. There, where earth and heaven touch, they died.

Sept – Dec 2007