At a web site in northern Peru , archaeologists have made a gruesome uncovering .
Among 47 tombs contain over 100 treasures , research worker have regain the remains of at least 12 children who they believe were sacrificially killed , reportsNewsweek . Once belonging to theChimú civilization , they may have been mow down in a bidding to impart rain to the sunbaked landscape .
The Chimú culture is thought to have uprise out of theMoche culturesometime around 900 cerium , with their clayware and artefact showing meaning crossover . It was all contained within a narrow strip of land some 32 to 160 kilometer ( 20 to 100 miles ) wide , sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Andes on the other .
While today this region seems inhospitable and stark , back then the belted ammunition of commonwealth had multiple river that curve their way from the foothills of the tidy sum . The flat land meant that irrigation and agriculture was easy and bountiful , while the plentiful sea satiate their nets with fish and other maritime treats , permit the refinement and company to fly high .
So bountiful was this environment , in fact , that it allowed the Chimú to build what is believe to be the largest pre - Columbian metropolis in all of South America , at a site known asChan Chan . Spanning 20 square klick ( 7.7 square miles ) , the city was immense and build almost entirely from clay bricks . The Chimú acculturation continue to craft hunky-dory alloy objective , cloth , and ceramics until the Incan Empire conquered them around 1470 , just 50 years before the Spanish point up .
But this was all base on an agricultural system that was to a great extent reliant on the rains . The river that feed the field of operation , snake their way down from the Andes needed the seasonal precipitation to be steady and predictable . It is when this started to slip that the archaeologists suspect the Chimú people had to turn to ever more drastic measures .
One of these might have been nipper forfeiture . “ What they [ Chimú ] wanted to do with the comportment of the children in this arid area is to attract rain , to better finish , ” says the director of the archaeological site , Victor Campos , toNewsweek . The remains of the children apparently show cut to their ribs , which the archaeologist suggests may have been the resultant of an effort to take the eye of the inauspicious teenager .
They were found along with almost 50 other tomb , curb a whole wealth of treasure , of which the archaeologist are now working their way through .
