Incan Mummies

The ancient Incas of Peru, and their many client communities, often deliberately mummified their dead. Important mummies (illapa) might be periodically removed from their tombs to participate in ceremonies where they were also offered food as if they were still alive.

Inca and Andean mummies were usually arranged in a fetal position and wrapped in layers of leather or cloth to form bundles. For the Inca that stillness and solidity was believed to “give the mummies their ability to move through time and continue to shape the lives of the living.”

With their empire's expansion in the mid-15th century, the Inca used mummification and ancestor-making in their conquest and subjugation of other Andean groups. According to Inca tradition, the Inca emperor was the sun’s direct descendant, making him the ancestor of everyone he claimed as a subject. When the Inca incorporated a group into their empire, they would claim the group’s ancestral mummies, giving them offerings and bringing the most powerful of them to the Incan capital of Cuzco.

Most of these such mummies have been lost through time or because the invading Spaniards confiscated all Inca mummies in 1559. The most prominent ones were taken to Lima and stored in a Spanish hospital where they vanished from history, either destroyed or interred.

Additionally, ritual sacrifices (capacocha), usually of Inca children, on the high slopes of mountains, also made natural mummies of victims due to the freezing dry conditions.