Tomb of Final Incan Emperor Believed Found

Funereal stones mark the site of the possible tomb.

The long-sought tomb of the final Inca emperor may have been located. "This is an absolutely important find for the history of Ecuador's archeology and for the (Andean) region," said Patrimony Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, speaking of the ruins found by Ecuadoran historian Tamara Estupinan.

According to the AFP news agency:

It was back in June 2010 that Estupinan, now a researcher with the French Institute for Andean Studies (IFEA), found what she describes as an "Inca archeological site" high on the Andes' eastern flank amid plunging canyons. Nearby are a small local farm and a facility for raising fighting cocks. 

But in the area called Sigchos, about 45 miles south of Quito, up on a hill dotted with brush, there is more -- much more: she found a complex of walls, aqueducts and stonework that lie inside the Machay rural retreat. Machay means burial in the Quechua language. 

"This is a late imperial design Inca monument that leads to several rectangular rooms that were built with cut polished stone set around a trapezoidal plaza," Estupinan explained to AFP. 

This year Ecuador's state Cultural Patrimony Institute will start work on a promising archeological site, and Estupinan will be front and center to raise the curtain on a massive complex sprawling over a ridge at 1,020 meters.

The Inca empire, in the 1400s and early 1500s, spanned much of South America's Andean region. The emperor Atahualpa was the last of his dynasty. During the Spanish conquest he was captured, pressed into Christianity, and then the Spanish executed him by strangulation. After his death in 1533, the Incan empire began to fall apart.

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Skeletal Remains Found of Pre-Incan Mass Sacrifice

Several of the skeletons of willing sacrificial victims.

More than a hundred skeletons believed to be remains of victims of a ritual mass sacrifice have been discovered in a pit next to the ancient Huaca Las Ventanas pyramid in northern Peru. The pyramid is part of the pre-Incan Sicán site, the capital of the Lambayeque people—also known as the Sicán—who ruled Peru's northern coast from about A.D. 900 to 1100.

According to National Geographic:

Perhaps more than a hundred bodies—buried nude and some of them headless—lie in the newfound pit, according to Haagen Klaus, a bioarchaeologist at Utah Valley University in Orem who is studying the finds. 

The bodies are almost all adult males, with the exception of two children, each accompanied by what appears to be an adult woman. 

Despite the huge mass burial, the Sicán were not warmongers, Klaus stressed. Instead the Sicán culture used an economy based on trade to build an empire that, at its peak around A.D. 1000, spanned thousands of miles across what is now Ecuador and Peru.

All the dead in the newfound pit were likely willing participants from local communities engaged in a ritual that celebrated death so that "new life could emerge in the world," Klaus said in an email to National Geographic News."Sicán was holy ground, and only the most sanctified of religious rituals involving ancestors appear to have taken place there. Mass ritual sacrifice appears to be the most likely interpretation" of the discovery.”

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Incan Fortresses Reveal War with Cayambe

A gate of the Incan fortress of Quitoloma.

Archaeologists in northern Ecuador have discovered evidence of an Incan war with a neighboring people as part of excavation of two fortresses built 500 years ago. “We're seeing evidence for a pre-Columbian frontier, or borderline, that we think existed between Inca fortresses and Ecuadorian people's fortresses,” Samuel Connell of Foothill College in California, told LiveScience.

The team has identified an estimated 20 Inca-built fortresses and two forts built by the Cayambe, an Ecuadorian society. “We know that there are many, many fortresses throughout northern Ecuador that haven't been identified one way or the other," said Chad Gifford, of Columbia University, also a project director.

According to LiveScience.com:

The discoveries suggest that there is a ring of truth to stories that Spanish chroniclers told when they penetrated into South America during the 16th and 17th centuries. According to these stories, Incan ruler Huayna Capac sought to conquer the Cayambe. Using a “very powerful army,” he was hoping for a quick victory but ended up getting entangled in a 17-year struggle.

“Finding that their forces were not sufficient to face the Inca on an open battlefield, the Cayambes withdrew and made strongholds in a very large fortress that they had,” wrote Spanish missionary Bernabe Cobo in the 17th century. “The Inca ordered his men to lay siege to it and bombard it continuously; but the men inside resisted so bravely that they forced the Inca to raise the siege because he had lost so many men."

Finally, after many battles, the Inca succeeded in driving the Cayambe out of their strongholds and onto the shores of a lake.

The newly discovered Inca fortresses are built out of stone, contain platforms called ushnus, and are located on ridges about 10,000 feet above the ground.

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Pre-Incan Graves Found Beneath Shantytown

A pre-Incan mummy and eight other skeletons have been unearthed in the middle of Lima, Peru, archeologists said yesterday.

Urban squatters had lived in a shantytown above the Huaca Huantille ruins for years, unaware they contained an ancient burial site, Reuters reported.

Archeologist Roberto Quispe working on the excavation said the bones were from the Ychsma civilization dating from between 1000 and 1400 AD.

The burial site was found after city officials kicked out 50 homeless families that had built a shantytown on the ruins, and later started excavations. Hundreds of archeological sites are scattered across Lima, and in some cases Catholic churches or mansions were built on top of Inca ruins after Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru.