Daily Mail Newspaper Review
Summary ratings: 3 stars
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Published: January 18, 2008
Preserved ice mummy of 500- year-old inca girl ‘ Ice Meiden’
She died 500 years ago, yet this 15 years old girl’s body was so well preserved in ice till date, that she looks as if she has just fallen into sleep and would wake up any time. Her frozen body has been declared as one of the best preserved Incan mummies ever found and she is on display in the High Mountain Archaeological Museum in Argentina.
Visitors are enthralled peering at the downy hairs still visible on her arms, the perfectly intact skin on her face and the braids falling on her face that is still in array, all gives her a life-like look.
Along with the remains of two younger children, the teenager were excavated from the slopes of a cloud swept volcano in 1999 by a team of archaeologists.
The three Children mummies came to be known after the mountain on which they met their death, were found with an extraordinary collection of elaborate gold, silver and shell statues, textiles, pots containing food and even an extravagant headdress made from the white feathers of an unidentified bird.
But the most remarkable part of the discovery is the state of the bodies, preserved not by embalming, like Egyptian mummies, but simply by the natural deep-freeze in which they were abandoned.
The CT scans showed that their internal organs appeared to be in perfect condition: one still had blood in its heart, the brains were completely undamaged and when the blood vessels were thawed the blood that poured out of them was crimson, as it would be in a living person.
They were sacrificed as per the Inca tradition called ‘Capacocha’. at the altitude of 16,000ft. Once they reached the summit, cold and exhausted, and dressed in their finest clothes - in the case of the elder girl, a grey shawl adorned with bone and metal ornaments - the children were allowed to die from exposure.
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