Dan Snow's History Hit - 3. Machu Picchu: Inca Gods and Human Sacrifices

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Part 3/4. Juanita the Ice Maiden is one of the most famous mummies in the world. She was found in 1991 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard lying out in the sun on top of a dormant volcano in the Peruvian Andes. Found almost perfectly preserved, she was bludgeoned to death as a human sacrifice.Dan is joined by Johan who tells the story of her discovery as well as a host of expert guests who give insight into Inca spiritual practices and death rituals….from speaking to oracles and keeping mummified family members in the house to child sacrifice. And, while visiting the Andean Sanctuaries Museum to see Juanita, Dan is presented with an extraordinary request...Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

When I decided to go to Ampato, it was really one of the last places I thought that would have anything. It started out just to be, well, let's go take a look up the slope. And as we went up Ampato, all of a sudden we began to see traces of the presence of the Incas. We found wood, then we found sandals, then we found pieces of textiles and stuff. It turned out it was like a high camp. We found finishes of textiles and stuff. It turned out it was like a high camp. This is the anthropologist and explorer Johan Reinhardt, who found Juanita, the ice mummy, in Arequipa.

So there we are. We're about 18,500 feet going along this narrow summit ridge, and these feathers are sticking out on top of the gold statue. My climbing partner, Miguel, had been further where I was taking pictures and had spotted this bundle further below. And he said, geez, that looks like it could be a mummy. And I said, maybe it's a climber. I mean, we don't know.

We went around, and sure enough, there was this bundle. It was obviously what they call a funerary bundle, laid right on the ice. There was lots of other stuff around it. There were pieces of wood, there was grain, there were some statues, but we still didn't know, really, what the state of the mummy was inside it. I asked Miguel if he could move it slightly,

and when he moved it, some of the cloth that had been covering the face went to the side, and there I was looking in as a face of Inca. This mummified body of a young girl, curled up alone on the peak of a dormant volcano, opened a window into the astonishing world of Inca rituals and spiritual practices. Some that are easy to make sense of, processions with music and dance, and others which are more difficult to comprehend, like human sacrifice. Each were instrumental in creating an Inca identity and social order. A system that bound all under the empire together, making an unstoppable force strong enough to control swathes of the South American continent. At least, until the Spanish arrived.

You can't understand Inca power without understanding Inca religion. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is my four-part series that takes you into the Peruvian Andes to trace the rise of the great Inca Empire and, of course, their swift demise at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors in their bloody pursuit of gold and riches. This is Machu Picchu, Episode 3, Inca Gods and Human Sacrifices. you've probably got the idea by now that every aspect of Inca life was imbued with spirituality And there were celebration days that was present in the architecture and the food.

Religion was inextricably bound up with the natural world for the Inca. And religion was also a way of asserting control. I'm here with Bibiani Melzi-Rodriguez at Machu Picchu. She spent 20 years researching Inca sites. And Melvin Vienna, a specialist tour guide here. Bibi, how does the natural world play into Inca mythology? Everything in nature was a god to them. The mountains were gods and they were called Apus. The water, the sun, Inti in Quechua, the rays, you know, the lightning, everything in nature was sacred to them and they respected it.

Melvin, so who are the main Incan gods? How's the pantheon structure? How are they related to each other? The Incas worship many gods. They worship the sun as the father, the moon as the mother, the stars like our brothers and sisters. as the mother, the stars like our brothers and sisters, the Incas worship the Pachamama, which is our mother earth, who is the provider, the one that gave us food, give us food because she's still alive. So the Incas had so many gods, but there was one that was probably the most important, who is the creator of the world. So the Incas worship the creator of the world, which is over the sun. Because if the sun exists, it's because somebody has created the sun.

And that was called Iliatexi Viracochan Pachayachachi, which is the name in Quechua for the creator of the world. But that is a god that we don't see. And the sun is the connector between that father with the world. And then the Sapaninka will be the son of the sun, which is the connector with the people in this world. So we would like to explain the Inca theology. which is the connector with the people in this world. So we would like to explain the Inca theology. It will be creator of the world, the sun, and his son, the Sapan Inc.

While religion was central to life in the Inca Empire, you might be surprised to know that as the Inca expanded out across new lands, bartering, bribing and appealing to the tribes and groups they encountered, they were never forced or expected to convert to the Inca religion. In fact, they were encouraged to continue to worship their own deities. Religion and spirituality is so personal, the Inca knew that trying to force people to follow their gods would make tribes less likely to willingly join them. Instead, the Inca said, hey, you can keep worshipping your gods, we just ask you to respect ours and acknowledge the power held by our supreme leader, the Sapa Inca. These religions that joined made Inca customs richer

and more varied, but most importantly, it meant that Inca grew their numbers, gaining pretty much willing participants to work and be part of their empire. Religion was reinforced in the many festivals and rites that were celebrated throughout the empire, a reminder to all the importance of participating in worship, but also taking responsibility for their role in the universe. Remember, Incas believed everyone and everything on earth was connected, all part of one sacred living thing. We heard earlier from Dr. Johann Reinhardt, the anthropologist and explorer who found Juanita, the ice mummy, in Arequipa. He's dedicated his life to better understanding the many ceremonies of the Inca,

from festivals to human sacrifice. Johann, the child sacrifice looms very large, but there were other types of Inca ritual, weren't they? Generally, they'd follow certain kind of principles. First of all, it depends on the kind of rite that you're doing. If we're talking about local rites, they might have very simple offerings, you know, incense, some liquor, alcoholic beverage, it's usually chicha, which is sort of a maize beer, always coca leaves being offered. On the other hand, if you're going to have more important gatherings, for example, for communities, you might have llamas being sacrificed. By the way, we say llamas in English, but, you know, it's pronounced llama.

So I'm not sure which I should be speaking. Anyway, so they can sacrifice llamas. I've seen it done. That is quite a right in and of itself because llamas are so important in Ika society. For example, the head would be buried along with certain aspects of the body. Then the main part of the body would be used as partly for an offering to the deity or deities because usually many were being invoked at the same time. And then distributed to the people that participated.

So it's always this kind of distribution thing going on, reciprocity and so on. You're offering something to the deity or deities, and you're asking them for support. They're the ones who, after all, make your lives possible. They're the ones who give you the rain for the crops and help the livestock and so forth. So it's fertility that's underlying a lot of this. And what about divination? What's interesting is that when the Incas did conquer these other areas,

they would be finding oracles in those places. In other words, the Incas had their own oracle. I mean, the deities that speaks through the priests. The priests would be talking with them and be able to communicate with them, frequently being talked to by these Ultima Sykes,

which are these very high category priests who can talk directly to the mountain gods. In some cases, the deities are noted, particularly with the Ultima Sykes, to take possession of them.

This is what we see often in shamans and shamanism. It's where the deities will take possession and speak through the person whose body they decided to enter, in that case, the priest. So they would call together the deities. We have depictions and the chroniclers, the early Spanish writers, depicted some of these ceremonies. And they would show like all the deities kind of gathered around and the Inca asking them questions. And the lunar calendar is very important, right? Each month was a season. There are various important moments in the harvest, the cycle.

That would have given great shape to the year. Absolutely. And, of course, all of that ties in. Absolutely. And of course, all of that ties in. I think one of the things that I found most interesting with the Incas is how closely it's involved with meteorological phenomena. In other words, gods of the sky, as it were, the rain gods. The weather god was more widely worshipped throughout the Incan Park than the sun god. Why? Because everybody had to deal with rain. not everybody thought the sun was that important the mountain gods by the way were usually the principal local weather god in other words they were the ones that controlled rain hail you know water coming out of the springs and so on and so forth and so a lot of the major ceremonies were taking place either at the summer and where solstices. Before we get on to the human sacrifice, there was animal sacrifice. You mentioned llama sacrifice.

That took place at some scale, didn't it? It was at the start of every month. Well, the scale, it sounds pretty phenomenal in the sense that there were so many. There might be 100. In some cases, 500 llamas might be sacrificed. We also got numbers like that. And we're speaking here of the chroniclers. We're speaking about the Spanish, early Spanish writers who were asking the Incas to give them the information.

In other words, we don't know how much was distorted from the original source. We don't know how much was distorted by the Spaniards as they were writing it down. We also have large numbers for human sacrifice. You know, I could say at the death of an Incan emperor, they might say 500 children were sacrificed. We never found 500 bodies in one place. So was it true? Was it an exaggeration? Were they just well hidden? Who knows? The tendency tends to be that there was some exaggeration going on. So we can take for a fact that these kinds of ceremonies took place. The numbers are what we can't be too sure of.

Let's come on to human sacrifice. When's the most likely occasions that you think it did happen? There's kind of traditional practices that it could do under certain circumstances, and there's non-traditional ones that relate to particular events. If it was the matter of an erupting volcano and so on and so forth, it would probably not be so dependent on a particular time, you know, like an annual kind of thing, but rather around a certain period when they're getting the divination as to when they should be making a sacrifice. When you talk about things like the death of the Inca emperor or the coronation of an emperor or something

on which sacrifices were supposed to be made, that's obviously not an annual kind of thing or periodic. And who do you think they chose? Who would be eligible for human sacrifice? The interesting thing about the Inca is it's something that, of course, attracts everybody's attention. They're sacrificing children. You have an automatic reaction in our society to that. But from the Icas standpoint, children were pure. You would not be offering an impure human being to one of these great deities. deities. And children who were being offered were supposed to not have any blemishes. If they were female, very beautiful. And the ages with the females seemed to be a little bit higher than those with the males. The Incas had special houses that they kept the young females. They're called

the houses of the virgins. They would be kept there not just for human sacrifice. That was actually one of the less frequent ways in which these young females were employed. They were usually there, you know, weaving. And out of that group of young females, supposedly the Inca emperor himself could select out a particular child, but frequently it would be some ambassador of the Inca that was sent. Now, there were also boys. As far as we've found with sacrifices, they're pretty much equal. Boys tended to be a little younger and possibly that's because, you know, they didn't have houses for boys. And boys don't have such a marked menstrual cycle

and things like that, which mark, you know, this transition to adulthood and so forth. The gist of it is, is that these young children weren't thought to be killed in the sense that we're thinking of. They were thought to be sort of, yes, sacrifice, but they then went to live with the gods. And these children became, in essence, sort of ambassadors that were from their communities that went on to live with the gods. And the villagers would keep in contact with them. They have a ritual specialist who would communicate with them and ask them to intercede on the behalf of the communities with the deities and so on.

So it was considered a great honor. It's been pointed out that the parents of children who were sacrificed were often given greater nobility or given higher positions in society. The Spanish recorded generations carrying on communication with a particular child that was sacrificed and now, in essence, is becoming somewhat deified him or herself. You've had extraordinary experiences searching for these victims of sacrifice. What's that like? What's that like as a lifestyle? Not for everyone. Get a little

off track here, but I did a lot of work over now, nearly 12 years living in the Amalayas, where I did a lot of research. And so between the Andes and the Amalayas, I once took a look, and it was 17 years where I continually be gone on expeditions, and I never stayed longer than two months in any one place before going on another expedition. So part of the problem is people might think, well, in order to do that, you must have had a lot of money. Well, rather the contrary. I once had a multimillionaire tell me, you know, the only people that can do this are people who are rich like me or poor like you because, you know, you have the time. And in my case, I just decided to live

wherever I was working. If it was, you know, in the Himalayas, I just spent years in the Himalayas, didn't move. After having spent so much time in the Himalayas, I only went to the Andes just as kind of a break. And when I found out that there were actually ruins at up to 22,000 feet, I'd never heard about that in archaeology. That was in 1980. And I thought, that's so unusual because that meant it happened hundreds of years before those altitudes were even reached by European climbers. 22,000 feet wasn't reached until the mid-1800s by European climbers. The Icas were building sites at 22,000 feet.

Tracks. They had different camps built all the way up the mountain, and they're doing it in the 1400s. Tell me about your famous expedition that ended up with you finding the Ice Maiden outside Arequipa. Yeah, the famous expedition was really not much of an expedition. It was just me and a climbing buddy. It started out just to be, well, let's go take a look up the slope. And as we went up the slope of Pato, all of a sudden, we began to see traces, particularly up around 20,000 feet of the presence of the Incas. We found wood, then we found sandals, then we found pieces of textiles and stuff. It turned out it was like

a high camp for the Incas. And when we we reached that site we saw that the summit itself was free of snow and so we went on up there and got up on the summit and saw that there were some feathers sticking out of the slope so we're going along this narrow summit ridge and these feathers are sticking out. Went to look at the feathers. The feathers turned out to be on top of a gold statue. My climbing partner, Miguel, had been a little further where I was taking pictures because we didn't have GPS or anything like that. How are we ever going to find a spot to bring an expedition back to? So he went on a little bit further and had spotted this bundle further below. It was obviously what they call a funerary bundle, a leg right out of the ice. There was lots of other

stuff around it. There were pieces of wood, there was grain, there were some statues, but we still didn't know really what the state of the mummy was inside it. I asked Miguel if he could move it slightly. And when he moved it, some of the cloth that had been covering the face kind of went to the side and there I was looking in as a face of anchor. That was more than a little bit of a surprise. I've got to figure that we had never seen a mummy just laying on the surface. At first, I was incredibly excited. Then I was a little disappointed because it had been dehydrated. The cloth covering the face had been ripped off.

And I thought, oh, well, you know, the mummy itself might not be perfectly preserved, which is too bad, but still, it was going to be an incredible find. It was the first frozen mummy that had been found in Peru. I asked Miguel to move it and he tried to lift it and he couldn't. And I realized that the whole thing had been perfectly frozen. It had to have been perfectly frozen. Why is it important? Because mummies that are frozen at the time of death means that it becomes like a time capsule. It enables you, because freezing is the best way to preserve organic material, you can do analysis and discover things that would be impossible any other way.

For example, some of the mummies that we've found, they have air still in their lungs from 500 years ago. They have blood in their veins, and so on. You have an intact brain. It's just amazing. Yeah. Well, tell me, you're looking into the face of an Inca. You've studied them for years. It must have been an extraordinary moment. What did you decide to do next? Exactly, because I knew how rare they were, and I knew how precious it was to try and keep it as frozen as possible. The idea of leaving it there to come back with an expedition later, you know,

it did cross my mind. That's what you kind of should have done if it was not a situation in which it was lying right out in the sun. She was lying like that because of an earthquake, some seismic activity. Why had she been uncovered? Now, she'd been uncovered because she'd previously must have been in a burial site on the ridge. It was probably some kind of platform that they had built. And with the eruption of Sabankaya, we believe that what eventually happened is that

the ridge collapsed. When the ridge collapsed, the whole burial went and just spewed out everything all the way along the slope. She's facing the sun. She's being damaged. What did you decide to do? I obviously was going to be coming back already with statues, so I know I was going to get in trouble. You know, you can't just go out without permits and start bringing back artifacts without a permit. But I couldn't just leave them ready to fall down the slope and disappear. I've always thought that the most important thing you can do

is preserve cultural patrimony, not let it be destroyed. So we felt the conditions were such they're warranted taking the items, not just leaving them, which is the ones that were exposed. But there was a big problem. People tend to think that you can just get a helicopter, particularly these days, because it is pretty easy. But in 1995, I knew that there were no helicopters that would be able to get up to the summit. We're talking 21,000 feet. And I figured that once it was on my back, I could get it to the edge because we had to traverse away. You know, I don't know how far, maybe a kilometer or so to get to the edge where we would start to go down. kilometer or so to get to the edge where we would start to go down.

You know, we had ice axes and Miguel was cutting some steps here and there, but it was still steep enough that there were times that I would fall. You start falling, you have a hundred pound on your back. You hardly have time to get your hands out to break a fall. You're pulled down so fast. So it was unpleasant getting to the edge because I probably fell down, I don't know, well, at least a half dozen times. And so we got to mummy to the base camp and then we went down to the night where we could get water because we had no water. The next night, I knew that there was a bus leaving from the village that we had started from.

That a bus was leaving at 11 o'clock that night. from, that a bus was leaving at 11 o'clock that night. And we made it in about 10 o'clock after 13 and a half hours of walking was one 10-minute break where we had one 10 of sardines amongst us and got the mummy on the bus by 11, which since it was an undercarriage, meant it would be cool. We had, of course, wrapped the mummy up in inscelite pads, and we had ice and stuff in it, around it, and so forth, to try and keep it from unfreezing. So we got the mummy there. It still had the ice on it, and it's still got some of the ice on it today, as far as that goes. Some of the ice is still in the folds. When you arrived down in Arequipa with a dead body, how did people receive you? Well, I knew that if Miguel got there, he could call the archaeologist Jose Antonio Chavez. And Jose had a good friend who sold freezer.

And I knew that we could get the mummy into a freezer quickly. When Miguel arrived, he said all the phones at the bus station were occupied, and he wanted to get going fast, so he took it to his house, and then the freezer got taken to Miguel's house, where it stayed two nights. In that time, we set up a lab at the Catholic University. The Catholic University has it up until the present day. What have we learned from that body? The ice main, because she's frozen and unfrozen through time, having fallen down and been exposed, was rock hard.

And it was very hard to get a needle biopsy, but they did get it through the stomach. They found out that she'd had a meal, you know, about three hours before she was sacrificed, if I remember right. Two of the mummies that we later found at 19,000 feet, we went back on a follow-up expedition just a month later on Ampato, and it was found that they had taken ayahuasca. This is a psychoactive drug that is pretty famous these days because of its association with the Amazon and hallucinogenic states and so on. Traces of that were found in the

hair of those two mummies. That is a sedative, but possibly these children's been given a sedative as well before they died. We know that they drank some maize beer, chicha. We know that they chewed coca leaves. We've even found coca leaves, cuds in the mouths of some of the mummies. What were those last few days of these young people's lives have been like? These children, when they were sent from Cusco and being distributed throughout, they were being distributed all over, I mean, to the north, to the west, to different major deities from Cusco. They went with, in some cases, their own parents.

We know, or at least chroniclers describe that, in processions. These were like pilgrimages in which various offerings were being taken to the mountain, but also offerings were being taken to sites along the way. The processions were said to have been very quiet when they went through populated areas so that people shouldn't even look at the procession, particularly, of course, at the kapakochas, the sacrificial children, and they would have these feasts. The interesting thing about doing these studies on some of the mummies is that they're finding out the eating habits that go back. They can trace the diet change as they get closer to the mountain. So initially, they're starting out having had a diet, an ordinary diet, but as they get closer to the mountain, it's shifting into

maize, which is a higher quality kind of food that was kept for special occasions, and meat. And these were not the normal daily foodstuffs. Now, as they get close to the mountain, this is where you have to kind of try and get into the mind of a child who is going up into the realm of the gods. This child is going to go to a better life, a happier life, a forever life, as it were. I mean, imagine being able to leave the hunger and everything behind that they might have had, you know, lower down diseases and so on, and go into this heaven, as it were, with the gods. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. I'm in the southern city of Arequipa now. There's a beautiful colonial era centre. a rich, rich cloudless blue sky. In the distance I can see the peaks of a couple of volcanoes towering above this landscape. And the reason I'm here is to see really one of the most extraordinary discoveries of human remains in the world. She's the body that Johan and his Peruvian climbing partner Miguel Zarate found in 1995 wrapped up on Mount Ampato giving her the moniker the Lady of Ampato. I'm walking into the Andean

Sanctuaries Museum where she's housed. I'm going to talk to Paula Berra who is the expert on all things Juanita. I've just walked into the laboratory and I'm right up close to Juanita now, the frozen body, and you can hear the refrigeration unit keeping her at the correct temperature. You can see the clothes still wrapped around her body. You can see her teeth, her lips are drawn back into her, what looks like a smile because of the way the skin shrinks, rec recedes she's got a full head of hair. Paola thank you for having us here tell me what do we know about Juanita? Juanita is very special because she was found with all the internal organs well preserved. The majority of the

children they some of them are dehydrated because of the altitude or the conditions of the water. But in the case of Juanita, we can see that she was surrounded by ice. So that's why all the body is well preserved. Wow. And how old do we think she is? She died between 12 and 14 years old. How was she killed?

The majority of the children were killed by suffocation or by a blow to the head. In the case of Juanita, she received a strong blow to the head that fractured the skull. Why do you think they sacrificed her? Probably in the case of Juanita, she was an offering to the gods of the water because the majority of the offerings that they found inside of the graves are of seashell or spondylus so that's the shell and spondylus was an offering or a dedication to the gods of war probably 500 years ago there was a flood what is your guess or sense of do you think juanita would have been from an elite family or was she an enslaved person? According to the clothes, the color of the clothes, probably Juanita belongs to a noble family.

And the majority of the writers, when the Spanish come, they put that the majority of the children that were chosen have to be to the noble families. Is she from this local area? Probably from Cusco. From Cusco? She's brought a long way. Yeah, probably from Cusco. How many days would that be, traveling from Cusco?

Months. Months? Months, yes. Yeah. So, what we're going to have to do is remove the body, as we've always done. Okay. I've just been told by the museum director, Franz Grupp, they're going to take Juanita

out, do some testing in the lab, weigh her etc. and I'm going to be able to help carry her from her storage facility to the laboratory. Listo, entonces lo vemos con él cuando llegue a sí. Listo, muy bien. This is a very intense experience. They're just unscrewing the case, the outer layer. There's about three or four layers of protection for Juanita. And we're just entering the third layer now. They have to get Juanita out periodically to do tests, to make sure the weight is stable,

to make sure that the freezing process is working. So it's very, very special indeed to be here today during one of the most terrifying things I've ever done in my life. I cannot believe I am responsible, partly, for this very precious. It's incredibly tense here. We are responsible for one of the great treasures of human history. One of the most perfectly preserved ice mummies ever discovered in history. Just wrapping her in a shroud in the sheet so that we can transport her to the other room. Okay are we lifting up now? I don't think my heart rate's going to turn to anything

near normal until she is safely back in her protective cabinet. Oh, well, I'm just ripping my hazmat suit off now after what was an unexpectedly intense experience. We took Juanita out of her protective case, and it just meant that we were cradling this young girl, not a million miles away from my own daughter's age, that over five centuries ago was led up to the mountain and bludgeoned to death it's hard to understand why a family would willingly give their most precious possession to be sacrificed on top of a distant mountain but i suppose that's exactly the point in their view of the universe view of the world they had to give their most precious thing

they had to give up that which they valued more than anything else in the world to help protect that world, protect the rest of the family and protect the society of which they were a part. The strangest thing was being up close to her and thinking the Inca believed that she would have a special role, that she would go on to have an eternal life, that she would be with the gods. And in some ways, they were were right she has now got this

remarkable life after death and her body will be around a lot longer than my body will and we'll go on learning about the Inca and our past from her for centuries to come when we were carrying her into the lab she didn't feel like any other human remains that I've ever worked with, not like a skeleton. She felt very human, that she was in a fetal position. You could feel her arms and elbows crossed, her little knees together, her feet tucked under them. It was like I was carrying my daughter up to bed. The discovery of such a well-preserved mummy ignited a fascination in the scientific community. What if there were more like Juanita? Reinhard would return to the mountaintop a month later with a full team and find two more mummified children, this time a boy and a girl. Reports from a Spanish soldier who witnessed sacrifices of children in pairs suggest that the boy and girl might have

been buried as companion sacrifices for mummy Juanita. It raises questions about the burial practices of the Inca and life after death. Dr. Christopher Heaney is an expert on Latin America and has just written a new book called Empires of the Dead. He can answer some of those questions. Whenever people think about mummies, you immediately think of Egyptians. But in fact, mummification occurred in very many different places, very many different time periods in the course of our human story, hasn't it? It goes all the way back. It's a story that for Egypt, it goes back millennia,

but it turns out in South America, it's even older. It's about 7,000 years old. And in South America, on the west coast of what is today Chile around Eureka, was the Chinchorro culture, who began mummifying their children to hold on to them after their death and maintain them as a part of society. Are there similar techniques if you want to keep a human being kind of preserved and with you? Are all these cultures reaching for the same technique or are there different ways of doing it? The old world understanding of mummification was one that was tied up with embalming and the use of,

in ancient Egypt, natron and bitumens. And this is how early Europeans thought about it. But when they started learning from the Spaniards that there was another culture that preserved its dead, there was an interest in, well, how did they do that? Did they do it in the same way? The Spanish actually began investigating it in the 16th century and decided that the Incas were, in fact, embalming their dead like the ancient Egyptians. or grandma and set them out, seat them. They weren't laid out flat, seat them and allow them to dry and becoming somebody that you could continue to interact with. The Incas did seem to be applying botanicals and resins and substances to the skin of their most elite emperors. The archaeologist Sonia Guillen has found that the Incas also seem to have been extracting innards from their dead and then plugging them up again with cotton so as to

halt to an even greater degree the decay that comes when people die. You mentioned the purposes of mummification, obviously keeping beloved or important members of the family and community with us, particularly around children. It's easy to empathize with that. Is there a way in which these bodies were stored? Would they be out in the public and open to the air, as it were? Or were they, even though they were preserved, were they kept separated from normal family life, for example? When the Spanish arrived, they found that Andean people were parading with ancestors and the dead.

This was the most sacred of them, the ones that were still understood to have some powers. But they were carried on litters on the shoulders of their loved ones or their subjects and regularly engaged with. The Inca emperors, mummified Inca emperors, occupied their palaces and were carried from place to place. Pachacuti, the probable builder of Machu Picchu, was certainly carried to Machu Picchu to enjoy it in death as he had in life. Other mummies, though, were kept a little bit more distant from the community in tombs high in the Andes or in caves. But even then, they were visited. Their tombs were open. The idea was that you could go and spend time with them, dress them and redress them, leave them food, corn or potatoes, pour a little bit of corn beer out for them so they can get a little drunk.

This was a way of showing them respect and keeping the world fertilized. The ancestors were the negotiators for the living with the larger cosmic world. And what they did was that they brought water. And so, they served a purpose in society. They weren't just living off of their descendants. They were these intermediaries that ensured that the community could grow in the future, sort of a link from the past to their descendants that they would never even know. of their subjects and turning them into another kind of mummy, the capacochas, the children who were ritually killed and sometimes interred and sometimes sent to the top of mountains. And one of the great ironies of Inca history is that it's those mummies that have lasted the longest. The original Inca emperors are gone. They were confiscated by the Spanish in 1559 and literally studied to death. They were sent to the Spanish hospital in Lima, the hospital of San Andres,

where they were put on display and Jesuits tried to figure out how exactly they were embalmed and preserved and they didn't seem to have survived the process. Pachacuti and Huayna Capac, two of the most powerful Inca mummies, they disappeared sometime in the 17th century. Meanwhile, though, there is Juanita, there's the maiden of Uyayaco, these incredibly preserved children that are now in museums in Peru and Argentina. Whether they should be is, you know, that's another question. That's something that touches back to the history of Bingham. That's fascinating. The Spanish just sort of took them into custody and then they were just destroyed through neglect or whatever. Presumably, there must have been tons of mummies around the Andes. Were they seen as rallying points for potential subversives? I mean, were they destroyed in situ as well? What was the Spanish general attitude towards these mummies? Well, once the Spanish figured out that they weren't

just dead, that they were understood as still sort of spiritually and socially alive, they saw them as a threat to their own imperial rule. They incorporated the Inca emperors by sort of taking these mummies down to Lima and sort of showing them a modicum of respect and not destroying them outright. But after that moment, after 1559, they switched to a new policy of extirpation. The ancestors are rounded up and burnt on bonfires. A lot survived. They were really only targeting the ancestors that were still in active use by communities. But it meant that in some places, this hundreds of years or if not longer of dead disappeared. Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings

and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm standing on a beautiful plaza in the heart of Cusco. Lots of hustle and bustle. People trying to sell me colourful Andean ponchos and textiles. Lots of tourists flocking hither and thither. And above me, there's a towering Catholic church in fact it's a Dominican monastery and on this site once stood the Coricancha the heart of the Inca empire literally the heart in fact it was the most sacred temple where they worshipped Inti

the Inca sun god in fact it was the only temple that existed purely for religious purposes. No other activities took place there. To enter this temple worshippers had to be barefoot, they had to fast and they had to carry a heavy load on their back as a sign of humility. And this was, when I said almost literally the heart, that's because this was the point that the Inca identified as the center of their world they believed that dozens of well ley lines really I suppose radiated out from Coricancha across the land for hundreds of miles and on those lines they built shrines and temples so this kind of spider's web emanated out from this epicentre in Cusco

which was the home of the emperor, the Sapa Inca. Physically where he resided and psychologically it was the place from which the Inca had sprung. I think Coricancha demonstrates more than anything a fusion between religious and imperial power. I've disappeared off down a side street now and I'm looking around and you've got the classic Cusco phenomenon, which is the Inca foundations visible, built in their traditional way without mortar. And on top of that, you get the colonial era buildings looking a bit more scruffy, lots of mortar between these stones. And the Coricancha was a very exciting proposition for the incoming spanish invaders because it sort of roughly translates as walls of gold which

we can't be sure but we believe the walls were lined with gold every wall covered with the stuff according to one account solid gold animals in the garden silver depictions of the moon goddess around the place as well so when the Spanish arrived in 1533 as you can imagine they were blinded by its grandeur and its opulence they'd never seen so much gold in one place before and they pillaged the lot they tore the Coricicancha apart and they plonked this big, and in fairness, quite beautiful, Catholic monastery right on top. And from where I'm peering out now, you can still see those stone foundations of Coricancha,

those massive Inca dark square stones. They're standing strong, but they're now supporting this ostentatious colonial building. It's such a symbol, really of the the process of conquest the transition from Inca rule to that of the Catholic Spanish and I suppose it's a bit of a metaphor for how the Spanish oppressed squashed the downtrodden indigenous people as they conquered this area in the 16th century. On the final episode of this series, we'll be tracking the downfall of this great civilization

from the arrival of the battle-weary Spanish conquistadors in Cusco to the kidnap of the Sapa Inca Atualpa and the final showdown between the Spanish and the Inca before they were defeated for good. This once mighty empire that covered thousands of miles of South America, an empire of 10 million people, reduced to just one mountaintop settlement in just a few years. It's a dramatic story folks, so make sure to keep an eye out in your feed for it, and if you've enjoyed the series so far, please leave us a rating and a review i'm dan snow and this is machu picchu

it was written and produced by mariana deforge and edited by google pat moore you you