A submerged Inca offering hints at Lake Titicaca’s sacred role
A stone box fished out of Lake Titicaca contains tiny items that add an intriguing twist to what’s known about the Inca empire’s religious practices and supernatural beliefs about the massive lake. Divers exploring an underwater portion of the lake’s K’akaya reef found a ritual offering deposited by the Inca, say archaeologists Christophe Delaere of the University of Oxford and José Capriles of Penn State. The carved stone container holds a miniature llama or alpaca carved from a spiny oyster shell and a gold sheet rolled into a cylinder about the length of a paperclip, the scientists report in the August Antiquity. The meaning of these objects to the Inca are unclear. Researchers suspect the Inca placed these two items in this stone box and then used ropes to lower it into the water during a religious ceremony of some kind.T. Seguin/Univ. libre de Bruxelles The location of the K’akaya offering indicates that...