Human sacrifice occurred in the valley over the millennia. It's thought that at least some of these mass sacrifices were attempts to appease the gods in the wake of El Niño, a periodic weather phenomenon that can lead to intense rains and flooding in Peru and droughts in other parts of South and Central America.
Other human sacrifice findings include more than 200 children found near the modern-day town of Huanchaco who were sacrificed sometime between 600 and 800 years ago, possibly during an El Niño.
A skull showing blunt force trauma that dates to the Chimu period, roughly 1375 to 1490. (Image credit: Haagen Klaus)
Of these skeletons, "only 25 (1.6%) exhibited traumatic lesions consistent with interpersonal conflict, and 77 exhibited post-cranial traumatic lesions consistent with accidental trauma (5.1%)," Klaus and co-author Thomas Snyder, a bioarchaeologist at New York University, wrote in the paper, which was published Nov. 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
A healed fracture on the left leg of a person who lived sometime between 1000 to 650 B.C. The fracture may have been from an accident. (Image credit: Haagen Klaus )
"Ritual violence may have alleviated non-ritual violence by creating spaces where social tensions could get worked out in a few different ways," Klaus said.
The "evidence of sub-lethal and lethal violence forceful enough to break bone is significantly higher in some areas of Peru's highlands," Klaus said. He and Snyder noted in their paper that the inhabitants of the Lambayeque Valley may have had better access to marine and water resources, such as seafood and rivers that could be used for agricultural irrigation, than those who lived in highland areas. Access to these resources may have helped alleviate interpersonal violence in the valley by providing more food resources, they wrote.
Scholars react
Environmental conditions may have helped reduce conflict or there could be "really unusual cultural practices in this region of avoiding or mediating conflict — both between and within groups," Elizabeth Arkush, an anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said in an email.
Related storiesConstanza Ceruti, an anthropologist and explorer with the National Geographic Society, said in an email that she's glad that researchers are studying human sacrifices "after decades of being ignored as a taboo topic in academic discussion." She praised the study’s large sample size and noted that human sacrifice is a "phenomenon primarily associated [with] the manipulation and concentration of power by elites."
Weston McCool, an archaeology professor at Cal Poly, said in an email that the newly published paper "is an interesting study that provides additional evidence for a sharp break in patterns of violence between the Andean coast and highlands." He noted that it "supports the hypothesis that coastal populations were buffered from terrestrial environmental downturns in ways that highland populations were not. The nature of that resilience, however, remains an important question for future research."
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