Site of sacrifices: This ancient artwork depicts what human sacrifice might have been like during the hey day of the Inca culture.
Courtesy Peru ArcheologicalJust in case you thought Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalytpo was a complete work of fiction, you might now want to reconsider. Researchers in Peru have uncovered the oldest-known Inca plaza, 5,500-year-old site was found in northern Peru.

Through carbon dating of items found at the site, researchers figure that plaza was in use between 3500 and 3000 B.C.

Much like today’s sites of spiritual gathering and rituals, the plaza was an impressive structure made of stone and adobe. It is circular in shape and sunken in to the ground of the Sechin Bajo archeological site in the Andes foothills about 200 miles northwest of Lima, Peru.

Next door, archaeologists also found a life size frieze depicting a sacrificer holding a knife in one hand and a human head in the other. That art piece as been dated as being about 3,600 years old.

All of the dating work on the Peru site gives further evidence that a very advanced society was bustling in the Americas at the same time that other urban cultures were thriving in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Tags : Inca, Inca culture, human sacrifice, Inca plaza, Inca rituals

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The ancient rain god Tlaloc: The Toltecs and Aztecs appear to have sacrificed children to him in hopes he would send them rain.Construction workers north of Mexico City have uncovered the one thousand year-old remains of two dozen children, the apparent victims of sacrifice to an ancient rain god.

Archeological estimations have dated the bones from 950 AD to 1150 AD, a time during the reign of the Toltec, a civilization that preceded the Aztec. The 24 skeletons were found in a single grave, laid out in the same east-facing position, with a figurine of the rain god Tlaloc. They appear to have been decapitated in a ritualistic way.

“You can see evidence of incisions which make us think they possibly used sharp-edged instruments to decapitate them”, said Luis Gamboa, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History .

"To try and explain why there are 24 bodies grouped in the same place, well, the only way is to think that there was a human sacrifice," he said.

The Toltec were a war-like civilization that dominated a region ranging from the Southwestern United States to the Gulf of Mexico and into Central America until about the late 12th century. They are known for sacrificing adult humans, usually prisoners captured from other parts of Mexico. But this seems to be the first evidence in the Toltec culture of the sacrifice of children.

The grisly site was discovered in the Toltec’s ancient capital Tula, about 80 kilometers north of present day Mexico City.

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Child sacrifice in pre-Columbian culutures

Tags : archeology, pre-Columbian, Toltec, Aztec, human sacrifice

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