In preparing for my trip to Peru, I've been reading about various aspects of the Peruvian history. The one thing that baffles me is the treatment of child sacrifices. It seems that the literature generally asserts that:
But I am not convinced. The evidence presented to support the above is that:
I completely fail to see that how this indicates that the children came from nobility (some articles go as far as claiming that the children were princes or princesses). For example, the Aztecs fed and dressed their sacrifices well for at least a year before the actual ritual, and as these sacrifices were treated as a member of the inner religious circle (or whatever prestige you have in that society), of course they could have had access to coca leaves that way. Along the same line of thought, they could have been well-treated and well-dressed BECAUSE they were already destined for sacrifice from a very young age, not the other way around.
Furthermore, the fact that some people used their children as a political stepping stone (i.e. they were REWARDED for volunteering their children as sacrifices; if it were truly an honour, people would be PAYING to volunteer their children, not the other way around) proves to me that these child sacrifices were reluctant participants, and most likely not nobility. I think that the more likely would be that they were of the under-privileged class, and that someone not them stood to benefit from their sacrifice.
I believe that there are some accounts of the Spaniards who rescued a girl who was walled up alive for three days as a sacrifice, and also another account of a boy who narrowly escaped being a sacrifice. La Doncella, one of the mummies from the Incan human sacrifice, apparently had well-worn teeth and white hair (at the age of 13!) which are often taken as signs of extreme stress.
I strongly believe that a society where death is truly an honour cannot exist -- if this were the case, everyone would just go ahead and kill themselves for a noble cause (ok, to be fair, the Incan empire didn't last long, but they didn't mean for it to crumble so quickly!) and I doubt even more that the children belonged to important people of the Incan empire. Rather, it seems like a well-designed scam where the children could be volunteered by anyone -- there is SOME chance that they would become child sacrifices, but also:
so that some people would literally tempt the fate, drawn by these two way more attractive possibilities.
So, why is it that the popular opinion today is still that the children were sacrificed willingly, and that they came from a noble line? I don't mean to be argumentative, and I would be glad to be convinced otherwise (because my views are clearly very grim and disturbing), but I wonder if the historians are overly glorifying the human sacrificial practices of the Incas. (Also since I am not an Andean scholar and most of what I reference comes from Google, you might have to correct me, too).
the child sacrifices were often linked to nobility or even the emperor
I'm having trouble find the source for this claim. It's not mentioned in pop sources like Wikipedia or NatGeo, which is good- it's quite wrong. I'm interested in where you saw this, if you don't mind sharing.
That doesn't mean we're done here though, since we've still this to understand:
it was a great honour for the family and the child to be chosen as the sacrifice.
and a couple other details to correct that I think will help you better grasp the capacocha sacrifice practices.
Details of the Inca capacocha ritual are known from ethnohistroic and archaeological sources. This article provides a great overview of both varieties. The use of Spanish documents should be done carefully, of course, they can range from passable proto-ethnographies to ideological drivel. Since the capacocha appears in several authors who visited distant regions, we can infer some details with decent accuracy:
Joan de Ulloa Mogollon:
When the [Sapa] Inca wanted to make a sacrifice or appease a huaca [...] they then killed some indios by his order and sacrificed them to the peaks and huacas to which the Inca had sent them; without his order, no one could kill an indio.
Bentanzos:
He [Pachacuti] decreed all these children should be five to six years of age
Juan Pablo de Ordengado:
the sacrifice of children or men was for a thing of great importance, such as a large plague [...] They believed that all infirmities came from sins that they had committed. And they used sacrifices as a remedy.
Martin de Murua:
There was a terrible earthquake in the city of Arequipa, resulting from a fearsome volcano three leagues from the city, from which the indiossay were launched such a fire, with awesome flames that left them stunned and awed for miles. Fue cierto haber revocado y salido del volcán tanta ceniza que llovió en todo el reyno, con universal admiración y miedo. If it weren't for the spirit Coya Mama Ana Huarque, most of the people in the provinces near Arequipa would have been devestated. It was first mandated to make sacrifices to their idols in their temple...
Sources are generally in agreement that children were sacrificed, that it was done under the authority of the ruling Inca family, and that it was done to garner some response from what the Spanish considered supernatural entities. We also know that when a capacocha was called, the chosen youths would process to Cuzco, accompanied by fine goods. There, they would feast with the Inca and his royal family and spend at least several months preparing for the ritual. Other sources indicate that sacrifices were made to ask for fertility, to commemorate buildings, or to accompany the death of a noble. There is plenty of earlier archaeological evidence for the second two; the first is harder to place through the archaeological record alone. I am hesitant to agree that capacocha had any sort of "atonement for wrongdoing" aspect, since the terminology is very Catholic. The Spanish often took Quechua terms (e.g. "viracocha" or "hucha"), turned them into Catholic words (e.g. "God" and "sin," respectively), and then interpreted Inca actions in terms of those meanings.
Why would someone send children?
Spanish sources mention two things: children were sent from groups conquered/assimilated by the Inca and that the Inca sacrificed acllas, young women sent to Cuzco, Pachacamac, and other centers to learn crafts and serve the Inca family. Both are tied into the Inca mita system. Rather than taxation in goods, the Inca empire demanded seasonal labor tributes: a percentage of able residents from each region were required to serve the state in rotating periods. The Inca themselves were just a small ethnic group, so they employed mita to bolster their military and rapidly construct their formidable infrastructure. Communities received protection and economic privileges as part of the empire, but the Inca did use the system quite oppressively at times. As part of this system, a community could send their smartest, most skilled, or more attractive girls to an Inca center. There, they would live as acllas , brewing corn beer and weaving for, and occasionally even administering, religious and political sites. This came with a certain "prestige" for the girls' family; of course, archaeologists can't excavate prestige. This likely helped such families assert themselves in local politics: they had the backing of the Inca, and you don't mess with that. Some historical documents mention a regional allicac, or "Inca-by-privilege," who operated within a region in the Inca's stead and which may have been a position bestowed in exchange for children sent for aclla-hood or capacocha. The reasoning, in both cases, is the same. It was not because death or life as an aclla was honorable, but because it was perceived as, or, perhaps more accurately, the Inca and local elites portrayed it as, a service to the state as part of a reciprocal system of exchange.
Archaeological evidence confirms that both individuals and material goods in capacocha contexts came from diverse parts of the empire. As determined by analysis of dental strontium isotopes, the capacocha discovered in Choquepukio, near Cuzco, contains children who may have come from Ayacucho to the north and Tiwanaku to the south, both hundreds of miles away. The most famous capacocha victim, that from Mt. Llullaillaco in Argentina, shows evidence of dramatic diet and lifestyle changes one year before their death. This includes consuming a significant amount of alcohol and coca, likely during their stay in Cuzco. Likewise, the best preserved capacocha contexts contain offerings of Spondylus shells, a saltwater mollusk with a very particular harvest time and location, predominantly from Ecuador. Ceramics in capacochas are all of the same imperial Inca style, but trace element analysis shows most assemblages contain a mix of locally produced vessels and ones brought from Cuzco or Lake Titicaca.
To finish let's reapproach those four lines of evidence you mention:
The coca found in victims' bodies typically is from just the past year or less of their life. Analysis also suggests that they had a substantial amount of coca and alcohol immediately before their death- they were heavily drugged when they died, and probably not entirely conscious for most of their trek up the peaks. Since this was a state-sponsored ritual, they would have no trouble procuring such things. As mentioned, their prior diet seems to typical of Andean populations- not malnourished, per se, but distinctly different from the diet of their final year. The ornate grave goods were likewise possible because this was an imperial ritual and do not reflect the specific prestige of the children. That local chiefs were volunteering children would actually go against the idea that they royalty.
TL;DR Capacocha victims were sent by local communities as tributes as part of an imperial system of obligation/taxation. Burials are indicative of Inca state-sponsorship, not of their own wealth.
Andrushko, Valerie A., Michele R. Buzon, Arminda M. Gibaja, Gordon F. McEwan, Antonio Simonetti, and Robert A. Creaser. “Investigating a Child Sacrifice Event from the Inca Heartland.” Journal of Archaeological Science 38, no. 2 (February 1, 2011): 323–33.
Ceruti, Maria Constanza. “Frozen Mummies from Andean Mountaintop Shrines: Bioarchaeology and Ethnohistory of Inca Human Sacrifice.” BioMed Research International 2015 (2015).
Bray, Tamara L., Leah D. Minc, María Constanza Ceruti, José Antonio Chávez, Ruddy Perea, and Johan Reinhard. “A Compositional Analysis of Pottery Vessels Associated with the Inca Ritual of Capacocha.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 82–100.
Mumford, Jeremy. Vertical Empire. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2011.