Four years ago archeologists in Lima, Peru, dug up a puzzling burial site belonging to a society called the Lima Culture, which flourished from A.D. 400 to 1200. The site seemed to tell a familiar story of Inca burial practices: the wives of a wealthy man had been sacrificed after he died. But the Inca came to power hundreds of years later. Last summer, physical anthropologist Michael Dietz at the University of Missouri and Peruvian archeologist Isabel Flores looked at the skeletons and graves at the Huaca Pucllana pyramid and concluded that the Inca may have inherited much of their sacrificial tradition from the Lima.
The graves belonged to an elite man and six women who may have been his wives. He had been interred on a bed of cane and covered with fine cloth. Placed nearby were six women lying with their arms crossed and their hands partially covering ...
