Brutal Inca Elites Mounted Little Girls Skulls To Gain Power

The Inca Empire was the largest and most extensive ancient society that ever lived in the Americas, but a new report says the elites ruled with the constant threat of extreme violence.

In author Kim MacQuarrie’s book Los últimos días de los incas it is said “ Pizarro and his men had achieved a new milestone of violence in the New World with the killing of nearly seven thousand indigenous people in just a few hours”. Nevertheless, once you’ve read this article you might agree that long before the Spanish arrived, Inca rulers had become highly-experienced themselves, when it came to brutally murdering innocent and defenseless ‘Inca’ children.

Little Girls Heads Chosen As ‘Trophy Skulls’

At its peak the Inca Empire ranged from modern-day Colombia in the north all the way south to Chile, and the new study which was published by a team of researchers, from the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Chile, in Latin American Antiquity set out to answer ‘how’ exactly Inca rulers maintained control over such a vast territory. The ‘Late Horizon’ defines a period in Inca history between the years 1476 AD and 1534 AD and the new scientific paper presented evidence in this time frame of “new forms of ideological violence emerging at the fringes of the Inca Empire ”.


A Science Alert article discussing the new paper says anthropologists Francisco Garrido and Catalina Morales analyzed “four severed and fragmented skulls dated to the Late Horizon era”, that were found in 2003 buried without their bodies in a prehispanic village called Iglesia Colorada, the largest settlement in the Copiapó Valley, in northern Chile.

A fragmentary trophy skull with drilled hole modifications. (F. Garrido & C. Morales / Fair Use )

Citing the new study, Nature reports that “four female skulls were found, three of which were from young women and the other was from a child” and holes had been punched into the skulls. These puncture wounds indicated the skulls may had been strung together on a rope and they were ultimately “thrown onto a trash pile”.

The skulls had been modified in several other ways including “orifices in the cranium vault and defleshing marks in the mandible” and these specific wounds can be accounted for if the skulls had been ritually mounted on sharpened poles as trophy heads , projecting fear and...

Read More HERE