Archaeology: Placing Incan Prayers in a Lake

Votive Offerings

Laying votive offerings before the gods is a religious rite that occurs across human cultures and eras. I remember vividly as a college student exploring small village churches on the Greek island of Patros. Before small altars, I saw tiny replicas of arms, legs, and other body parts made of tin or ceramic. These votive offerings signified a prayer for healing or safety. At the time, they seemed so foreign to me and outside my experience, but they shouldn’t have. Visually representing our mortal needs to the gods is a remarkably common human inclination. I’m guessing you can think of familiar examples, either from the distant past or from our own times.

An Incan Box Sealed Tight with Treasures

Thus, this short article intrigued me. It describes an Incan stone box filled with votive offerings. Unusually for this type, the seal held and the contents remained pristine. Someone in the 15^th or 16^th century CE carved a hole and tight-fitting lid into a chunk of andesite stone. Into that smoothed-out cup they placed a tiny representation of a llama or other creature of the “camelid” family which they’d carved from shell. On top of that beast of burden, they tucked a roll of gold foil.

Pilgrimage Prayers as Votive Offerings

The other feature of the stone box is a pair of holes used to suspend the box on ropes. The “altar” where an Incan laid this votive offering is the bottom of Lake Titicaca. The Incas considered the lake as their birthplace. It served as a major pilgrimage site. The person seeking access to the gods carefully lowered the box down to the lake’s reef. He or she chose symbols of great value. The llama provided food, transportation, wool, and company. Also, for a people who worshipped a sun god, gold held great significance. Together they probably formed signs of the caravan and the cargo—a vulnerable endeavor that calls out for divine protection.

Parallel Experience Across Time and Place

From this, I am minded of the Hittite donkey caravans piled with wool and tin, and other precious items. And the Hittite votive miniatures that archaeologists have excavated. Across the seas and independently, humans reach for divine assistance in remarkably similar ways. It is a touching and perhaps transcendent impulse.

Tell me about an example that comes to your mind. Click here to read the article “Artifact” in Archaeology Magazine.

For a Roman example of a votive offering buried in a well.