The face of the natural mummy of the Ampato Ice Maiden, a victim of human sacrifice, has been reconstructed in great detail.
Reconstructed face of the Ice Virgin. Photo: Oscar Nilsson
More than 500 years ago, a 14-year-old girl was taken to the Andes and sacrificed to the Inca gods. Buried in the mountains with many offerings, the young girl's body became a natural mummy over time, preserving her hair, fingernails, and the colorful strings she wore on her final days. But at some point in the intervening centuries, her face was exposed to the elements like sunlight and snow, causing many of her features to gradually disappear, according to National Geographic .
Now, the Inca girl’s disfigured face has been restored through archaeological analysis and forensic reconstruction. A striking 3D bust of the young woman nicknamed the Ampato Ice Maiden is the centerpiece of a new exhibition in Peru that explores the tragedy of human sacrifice that took place in the Andes half a millennium ago.
When National Geographic explorer Johan Reinhard came across a mummy known as Juanita on the 21,000-foot Ampato mountain in the Andes during a 1995 expedition, he knew he had discovered something extraordinary. Reinhard recalls that the mummy initially looked like a large bundle of rags, but then he saw a face between the layers of cloth. It was a young victim of the Inca practice known as capacocha.
Capacocha primarily involved the sacrifice of children and animals to the gods to counteract natural disasters, consolidate the power of the ruling class in the outlying provinces of the Inca Empire, or simply to please the gods. The sacrifices played an important role in the maintenance of the Inca Empire, and included large feasts and processions that accompanied the child chosen for his or her beauty and physical perfection. Being chosen for sacrifice was a great honor for the child's family and community. The method of sacrifice varied, depending on the deity being worshiped. Some children were buried alive or strangled, others had their hearts removed. The life of the Ice Maiden ended with a blow to the back of the skull with a blunt object.
Restoration expert Oscar Nilsson was familiar with the skull. He spent months working on a mock-up of it in his Stockholm studio, eventually producing a sculpture of a 14-year-old girl that looked lifelike from a distance. It was a two-step process, says the Swedish archaeologist and sculptor. First, Nilsson immersed himself in the subject’s world with an archaeologist’s eye for detail, scouring as much data as he could to understand what she might have looked like. Though the mummy’s face was destroyed, he was able to deduce the thickness of the muscle tissue surrounding the bone, and use CT scans, DNA analysis, and information about diet and disease to visualize her face.
Nilsson then printed a 3D copy of the Ice Maiden’s skull, used wooden clamps to mark the thickness of the tissue, and placed hand-molded muscle bundles in polymer clay. Next, he worked on features like the eyes, nose, and cheeks. After creating a silicone mold of the chest, Nilsson added hundreds of hairs. The entire process took 10 weeks. The portrait of the Ice Maiden will be on display alongside her mummy at the Santuarios Andinos Museum in Arequipa, Peru, until November 18.
An Khang (According to National Geographic )
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