Why It Sucks to Be a SACRIFICED Daughter (in Inca Empire)

You are born around 1490 in a stone village high in the Andes, the first girl after three boys. Your father carries you to every house in the village to show you off. Ten years later he walks to Cusco, offers you to the Sun, and comes home a lord. This is the life of a girl chosen for the capacocha, the Inca offering of children, told in second person: the year of meat and coca, the feast in the great square of Cusco, the straight-line walk home across every ravine, and the hill above the Inca's fields. SOURCES Rodrigo Hernandez Principe, 'Idolatria del pueblo de Ocros... Ano de 1621', in 'Mitologia andina', Revista Inca, vol. I no. 1 (Lima, 1923): the case of Tanta Carhua and the capacocha ceremony in Cusco Pierre Duviols, 'La Capacocha', Allpanchis 9 (1976), pp. 11-57 Cristobal de Molina, Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Incas (c. 1575), ed. H. Urteaga (1916): the capacocha chapter and the straight-line walk home Juan de Betanzos, Suma y narracion de los Incas (1551), ed. M. Jimenez de la Espada (1880) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (1615), Royal Library Copenhagen GKS 2232 4o, pp. 228-232: girls' work by age A. S. Wilson et al., 'Archaeological, radiological, and biological evidence offer insight into Inca child sacrifice', PNAS 110(33) (2013): 13322-13327 A. S. Wilson et al., 'Stable isotope and DNA evidence for ritual sequences in Inca child sacrifice', PNAS 104(42) (2007): 16456-16461 MAAM (Museo de Arqueologia de Alta Montana), Salta, Llullaillaco collection NOTES ON PRECISION The heroine Sisa, her parents, her brothers (including Rumi), her uncle and the girl Quilla are invented. Sisa's path follows the one documented case in which a sacrificed child's story was written down whole: Tanta Carhua of Ocros, recorded in 1621 by Hernandez Principe from the people who still prayed to her. Her father Caque Poma, his new lordship, her burial in a shaft tomb on a hill above the Inca's lands, the priests who answered in her voice and the call 'Come here with your father, Caque Poma' all come from that record. Sisa is not Tanta Carhua: her family, her age at death, the fall, the canal work and every line of dialogue are reconstruction. Details documented for other capacocha children (the year of richer food, the coca and chicha, the haircut kept in a bag) come from the 2007 and 2013 Llullaillaco studies and are shown as how it was done. The three children found on Llullaillaco in 1999 are shown only through the museum case and the published paper. The 'hundred thousand llamas' killed at the Cusco feast is a traditional figure that nobody could have counted. The Inca is not named and the date is given as 'around 1490' because Inca reign dates are reconstructions. The violent methods some Spanish writers describe are left out. Andean religion is shown as the people in the story believed it, with respect. Everyone in this video is a stick figure and the main character is invented. No likeness of any real person is depicted or implied.