Human sacrifice took many forms in ancient South America. Individuals were killed and placed in tombs to accompany important persons in the afterlife, buried as dedicatory offerings in monumental buildings, and offered in various contexts as gifts to the gods. Captives were taken in small-scale raiding and in organized warfare, and executed in both formal rituals and impromptu reprisals. In some cases, body parts were collected from dead enemies and modified for various uses.
Sacrificial practices can be reconstructed from both indirect and direct sources. Indirect sources include historic accounts of trophy taking (such as the Jívaro of tropical Ecuador), descriptions of sacrificial practices recorded by Spanish and native chroniclers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and depictions of sacrifice and trophy taking in ancient South American art. Indirect sources must be used with caution: ethnohistoric accounts have various inherent sources of bias (Rowe 1946; Salomon and Urioste 1991; Adorno 2000), and iconographic depictions of human sacrifice often reference mythical or metaphoric elements (Cordy-Collins 1992; Proulx 2001).
Archaeological evidence of retainer and dedicatory burials, mass graves, and isolated body parts constitute direct evidence of sacrificial practices. The careful analysis of human remains from these contexts is important in distinguishing between sacrificial practices and standard mortuary behavior. Direct archaeological evidence of human sacrifice is therefore important in confirming or questioning events inferred from ethnohistoric and iconographic sources. Fortunately, the database of physical evidence of human sacrifice in Central Andean South America has grown substantially in recent years, thanks to field projects with an increasing focus on the careful excavation and curation of human remains and laboratory analyses of this material. This review will focus primarily on Central Andean South America, where the ethnohistoric and archaeological records are most detailed.
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Verano, J.W. (2008). Trophy Head-Taking and Human Sacrifice in Andean South America. In: Silverman, H., Isbell, W.H. (eds) The Handbook of South American Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74907-5_52
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