The Inca Gave Children Drugs Before Sacrificing Them to the Gods, Including Cocaine and Alcohol

Chemical traces reveal how the Inca prepared children for sacrifice on sacred mountains 500 years ago.

In the final month of her life, an eight-year-old girl in the Inca Empire appears to have consumed alcohol while chewing coca leaves. We know this because six centimeters of her hair, preserved for some 500 years on a frozen mountain in Argentina, still holds a chemical record of the substances she ingested in her last months.

What’s particularly harrowing is that the very young girl was killed in a religious ceremony. She was a human sacrifice, a ritual most likely performed by the Inca state itself, perhaps during a great milestone such as the death or coronation of the Sapa Inca, or during a major crisis such as severe drought and famine.

Her body, recovered from Mount Chuscha, suggests that the Inca prepared children with the help of psychoactive substances for what they understood as a journey to the gods. Rather than inducing visions, some may have helped them endure exhausting journeys or dulled the fear of what awaited them.

A Sacred Journey with a Deadly Destination

The sacrificial ritual, called capacocha, was among the Inca Empire’s most consequential religious ceremonies. Children and young women were selected across the empire, often brought to Cusco for ceremonies and then sent toward distant shrines. Some climbed to heights exceeding 6,000 meters, where the cold preserved their bodies for centuries.

The Inca believed sacrificed children could serve as intermediaries between the living and mountain deities. Such offerings could mark a ruler’s accession or seek divine help during drought or political upheaval. The ceremonies also helped imperial authorities assert power over communities and local gods.

To learn what the children consumed, Dagmara Socha, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw, and her colleagues used forensic techniques to detect minute chemical residues. As hair and nails grow, they trap traces of substances circulating in the body.

Of the eight mummies they studied from mountains in Peru and Argentina, six retained hair and two retained nails suitable for study. All six hair samples contained cocaine and its breakdown product, benzoylecgonine. The children most likely chewed coca leaves which should not be confused with the modern refined cocaine use that wasn’t accessible during ancient times. The nail tests did not establish coca consumption in the other two individuals.

Chewing coca leaves was both sacred and practical. It could suppress hunger and fatigue and may have helped children cope with strenuous climbs and thin mountain air.

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Four mummies also carried traces of cocaethylene, a compound the body makes when cocaine from coca leaves and alcohol are present together. The alcohol may have come from chicha, a fermented maize drink that Spanish chroniclers described as part of Inca ceremonies. They even wrote centuries ago that it was given to children to calm them and dull their senses.

A Girl’s Final Six Months, Preserved in Hair

Researchers divided the Chuscha girl’s hair into six one-centimeter sections, roughly corresponding to her final six months.

Cocaine concentrations fluctuated, then fell sharply in the section nearest her scalp. Cocaethylene appeared only in that final segment, suggesting alcohol use in her last month.

Yet this sequence differs from what a 2013 study published in PNAS found in three sacrificed children from Mount Llullaillaco. There, coca and alcohol consumption extended over longer periods, with the oldest girl showing particularly heavy use before death.

So perhaps there wasn’t a single script for capacocha. Preparation may have depended on the sacred mountain, its deity and local traditions.

One especially interesting finding from the new study concerned a 14-year-old girl found on Peru’s Mount Ampato in 1995, known as Juanita, who carried a small amount of harmine in her nails. The compound occurs in plants used to make ayahuasca, including Amazonian vines that may have reached the Andes through trade.

The Drugs They Did Not Find

The researchers looked for compounds associated with powerful hallucinogens, including mescaline, DMT and bufotenine. None appeared in the tested samples. Although harmine can affect mood and interact with other psychoactive substances, its presence, by itself, is not enough to say that the user had a hallucinatory or psychedelic experience.

The most likely explanation is that the cocktail of coca, alcohol and harmine helped the children remain physically capable and emotionally subdued on their journey.

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“Five hundred years after these children were sacrificed during one of the most important Inca rituals, new technologies are allowing us to uncover details of their lives and Inca religious practices,” Socha concludes. “What we are seeing is that the capacocha was not a single standardized ritual, but rather the Incas appear to have adapted it to different cults and local religious traditions.”

The new findings were reported in the journal Antiquity.