All eight sacrificed Inca children tested carried cocaine traces, and one held an ayahuasca compound

Hair samples from all eight Inca children examined in a University of Warsaw toxicology study contained cocaine, and nail clippings from one of them, the 14-year-old known as Juanita or the Ampato Maiden, held harmine, a compound used in preparing ayahuasca. The children died about 500 years ago in capacocha sacrifices carried out at high Andean shrines in what is now Peru and Argentina. Cold and altitude preserved their bodies, which let chemists read the final months of their lives from strands of hair.

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Coca leaves ran through Andean ritual and daily life, so cocaine alone was an expected result. The sharper question is whether each child was prepared in the same way before death, and the early answer is no.

Dagmara Socha of the University of Warsaw led the analysis, published in Antiquity as “Toxicological studies on the Inca frozen mummies from volcanoes in Peru and Argentina”. Archaeology magazine reported on Nov. 6 that cocaine turned up in every sample, that some victims also showed alcohol, probably chicha maize beer, and that only Juanita tested positive for harmine. Socha was quoted as saying that what surprised her most was the diversity of the results. Hair works as a timeline because it grows slowly, so each segment records a window of exposure stretching back many months before death.

Capacocha was an Inca state rite in which children were selected from communities across the empire and offered at shrines on sacred peaks, and Archaeology magazine notes it often took place at mountain shrines high in the Andes. The surviving mummies owe their condition to ice and dry cold. They have been studied for decades through scans, DNA and now toxicology, and each method has added another layer to what is known about the weeks before death.

Eight mummies from five mountains

Published accounts agree on the count of eight and on the five volcanoes involved: Ampato, Chuscha, Llullaillaco, Quehuar and Sara Sara, according to Techlicious. Juanita, the 14-year-old from Ampato, is the best known of them. A girl of about 8 from Chuscha, a 14-year-old from Sara Sara and a 10-year-old girl from Ampato are described in figure captions that Gizmodo reproduced. A separate write-up from Archaeology Mag also lists the Llullaillaco individuals called the Doncella, the Younger Girl and the Boy, plus the Quehuar mummy.

The children ranged from 6 to 14 years old, Gizmodo reported, and the ones described individually are mostly girls. That narrow age band matters for the chemistry, because a younger child’s hair is shorter and records fewer months than an adolescent’s.

No outlet printed a full eight-person roster with a mountain beside each child, and the accounts do not fully agree on which Llullaillaco and Ampato children were sampled. This article therefore names only the individuals that the reports give, and the full list sits in the Antiquity paper.

Harmine, the ayahuasca compound, in Juanita’s nails

Harmine is an alkaloid from Banisteriopsis plants, a vine used in ayahuasca brews that come from the Amazon basin rather than the Andean highlands. Archaeology Mag says no mummy other than Juanita showed it in this round of testing. Techlicious adds a caution that the nail samples were likely contaminated and that her hair still needs analysis, while earlier work had found harmine in two other Ampato children.

One positive nail result is therefore a lead to follow, not a closed case. It does show that a plant compound tied to ayahuasca could be detected in a child from a Peruvian volcano, which is why the finding drew attention in the first place.

Coca, chicha and cocaethylene in the hair

Cocaine and its metabolite benzoylecgonine appeared in every hair sample, which the authors read as confirmation that all eight children chewed coca. Four showed signs of alcohol, drawn from the Chuscha and Llullaillaco groups. Two of those four, the Chuscha girl and one Llullaillaco child, also carried cocaethylene, a compound the body makes when cocaine and alcohol are present together.

The Chuscha girl has the most detailed record. Her cocaine levels rose and fell across the months of growth captured in her hair, then declined in the final month, and alcohol showed up only in that last segment. Hair from her and from the Sara Sara mummy had tested negative for cocaine in earlier studies and tested positive this time, which Techlicious ties to modern methods that detect very low concentrations.

Because alcohol appeared in only four of the eight children and cocaethylene in only two, the last months of these lives clearly differed from site to site. That spread is consistent with Socha’s remark about diversity, and it argues against a single standard recipe applied to every child who was sent up a mountain.

Gizmodo quoted Socha concluding that preparation of children for sacrifice was not uniform across the Inca Empire, and that the method can reconstruct small details of their final months. Two questions stay open: what Juanita’s hair shows about harmine once it is analyzed, and whether any of the other seven children carried an ayahuasca-related compound at all.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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