SANTUARIOS ANDINOS MUSEUM - Arequipa

The Museum “Santuarios Andinos” or “Santury Museum” was created in 1996, following the major archaeological research and discoveries in southern Peru. The museum is in charge of the project “Santuarios de Altura del Sur Andino” or “High Sanctuaries of the Southern Andes”, led by Dr. Johan Reinhard and José Antonio Chávez Chávez.

The Museum has five galleries exhibiting ceramic, textiles and metal, and includes eight frozen bodies of women who were sacrificed on the snow capped mountains in southern Peru. The most important of the women sacrificed is “Juanita”, who was the first to be found in 1995. Today she is exhibited in a special freezer, protected from the environment by a closed glass chamber vacuum. The box is secured with steel bars and has two layers of Plexiglas. The interior of this box is at a temperature of -19°C to prevent body decomposition.

Other bodies besides Juanita are: “Urpicha” or “Dove” found in the volcano Pichu-Pichu and “Sarita” found in the Sara-Sara volcano. Found with them were five more sacrificed women found in the Misti volcano in August 1998. These findings confirm that the Inca Empire practiced human sacrifice.

JUANITA THE ICE MAIDEN

Juanita is the name given to a frozen corpse, which was discovered in 1995 by Johan Reinhard and Miguel Zárate in the snow capped volcano called Ampato, in the Andes Mountains of Peru. Also known as “The Lady of Ampato” or “The Ice Maiden”, this woman was not sacrificed by the process of artificial mummification, in which internal organs were removed and then the body was embalmethroe preservation. The body of "Juanita" retains all its organs intact due to freezing glacial temperatures (natural mummification) of the mountain Ampato (Arequipa, Peru) where she was buried and placed as an offering.
The body of this young woman was subjected to a virtual autopsy in the laboratories of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (Maryland, USA). She had a CT scan and was subjected to a three-dimensional X-ray. The body is that of a girl, about 14 years of age, who died around 1466. She was a member of the Inca Empire and probably died during the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui.

She was slender and beautiful. She had not suffered from any disease. She had perfect teeth and bones. She had enjoyed good food with a balanced diet and had fasted a day before slaughter. She had a 5-cm crack in her skull and internal bleeding that ended his short life. She died by a well-aimed blow to the head with a club, probably while she was kneeling.

BRIEF HISTORY

On September 2, 1995, an expedition to volcano Ampato was organized to observe the effects of the eruption of Sabancaya volcano and the possible detection of any archaeological evidence. The expedition "High Sanctuaries in the Southern Andes" was led by the American archaeologist Johan Reinhard, who in the volcano's crater, found a lump, which contained the body of the mummy, “Juanita”. She was in very good condition, except for some parts of her body that were exposed to the sun. Furthermore, in this vicinity, several statues of gold and pearl Spondyllus, and several types of plants, including maize and pulses, were discovered.

This important finding required an immediate archaeologist return to the mountains to investigate and search for additional mummies in the snow.  Sarita, another snow maiden, was discovered on the summit of Sara Sara volcano.

The Incas made offerings of children on these mountains and in adjacent parts to these mountains. In the case of Arequipa, it is possible that some of the offerings that were conducted in the vicinity of the mountains Pichu Pichu, Misti, Chachani, etc, were due to the eruption of Misti volcano. Field investigations have demonstrated that the Misti volcano erupted about the year 1440-1450, being a totally catastrophic event for the people who lived in what is now Arequipa.  An ash layer of 10cm spewed from the volcano on that date and covered all of Arequipa. Radio-carbon dating of Juanita dates her to be 530 years old, meaning the year was approximately 1466 AD.

JUANITA AND THE COENTIFIC COMMUNITY

The body caused sensation in the scientific world, because it was so well preserved.  Between May and June 1996, it was exhibited at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, in a temperature controlled box, and then was donated to the Catholic University of Santa Maria de Arequipa.

In its June 1996 edition of The National Geographic, a special supplement was published devoted to this discovery. Konrad Spindler said that this was the best preserved human being of the Americas and that this was the first woman found in the Andes near Cusco.