Perfectly preserved 500 year old Incan mummy found to still be “hittable” [News]

On display in the High Mountain Archaeological Museum in Argentina is a mummy found in 1999 that is over 500 years old and is considered one of the best preserved mummies ever found anywhere.

The body of the 15 year old girl is being called “The Incan Ice Maiden” and was plucked from the peak of a windswept inactive volcano.

She was found with two other younger children and while there is very slight damage from a lightning strike at some point, scientists say the internal organs are perfectly preserved.

Skypedia describes the process in which these children were killed and mummified for religious ritual:

The three children’s journey to the place of their death would have begun some 500 miles north from where they were found, in Cuzco, in what is now Peru.
They would then have set off by foot, in a long procession with other children, priests and officials, arriving at the foot of the Llullaillaco some weeks later.
Given an alcohol made from fermented corn to drink, and coca leaves to chew to ward off fatigue and pain, they must then have been marched steadily uphill, into the thinning air.

They would have had a desperately hard time of it: above 16,000ft the body struggles to adapt itself to altitude, and as well as oxygen deprivation their small bodies would have had to cope with painfully low temperatures.
Once they reached the summit, cold and exhausted, and dressed in their finest clothes - in the case of the elder girl, a grey shawl adorned with bone and metal ornaments - the children were allowed to die from exposure.

“The priests lit fires or burned offerings as they waited for the children to fall slowly unconscious and they were ready to place in their tombs,” Constanza Ceruti, the Argentinian anthropologist told the New Scientist magazine.

Read the whole article at Skypedia.