Free Republic

LIMA (Reuters) - A 4,000-year-old temple filled with murals has been unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, making it one of the oldest finds in the Americas, a leading archaeologist said on Saturday. The temple, inside a larger ruin, includes a staircase that leads up to an altar used for fire worship at a site scientists have called Ventarron, said Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who led the dig. It sits in the Lambayeque valley, near the ancient Sipan complex that Alva unearthed in the 1980s. Ventarron was built long before Sipan, about 2,000 years before Christ, he said. "It's...

Archeologists said Friday they have discovered a tomb about 1,200 years old, from the pre-Inca Sican era, in northern Peru. Human remains and jewelry were found July 4 along with the tomb, likely that of a member of the aristocracy of the Sican or Lambayeque elite, head researcher Carlos Wester La Torre told AFP. A gold earflap, a silver-plated crown, and some 120 silver and copper ornaments that served as emblems of power, along with 116 pieces of pottery and seashells were found in the tomb. The tomb was located in a burial chamber some six meters (20 feet) deep...

Sacrifice is an age-old ritual, but the inhabitants of 10th-century Peru brought sinister novelty to their rites by slaughtering children. In the Lambayeque valley on the north coast, the earliest definitive evidence of ritual child sacrifice uncovered.... "The scale and sheer complexity of the blood sacrifice of children appears to be something completely new," said Haagen Klaus of Utah Valley University in Orem... To investigate the role of ritual sacrifice in the Middle Sicán period, researchers examined 81 skeletons at the site, probing their teeth and bones to determine who they were and why they'd been killed. ... 70 per...