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What did archaeologists find at Tambo Viejo?
Tambo Viejo was an Inka provincial center in the Acarí Valley on Peru’s south coast. A 2026 article in Ñawpa Pacha reports coca leaves associated with llama and guinea-pig sacrifices there, and argues that coca played an important role in Inka ritual activities. The publisher-indexed abstract supports that broad association; the journal page itself is not available here for further detail. Read the article record and abstract.
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The account that coca leaves were scattered directly over llamas comes from a separate manuscript by archaeologist Lidio M. Valdez, posted as a preprint in July 2026. A preprint has not necessarily undergone the same peer review as a journal article, so its detailed description should be attributed to that manuscript rather than treated as independently confirmed by the Ñawpa Pacha article. Read the preprint.
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The reported deposit
Valdez’s preprint describes nine young llamas in a prepared pit. They were adorned with colorful tassels and necklaces; coca leaves and fragments of Spondylus shell were reportedly scattered over them. The account also describes clean sand covering the animals and a fire lit at a central location.
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Were the llamas burned or buried alive?
The preprint says the animals themselves appear not to have been burned, despite the reported fire feature. It proposes that they may have been buried alive and died by suffocation because investigators did not identify lethal cut trauma. That is a cautious interpretation of the reported evidence, not a certain determination of how each animal died. The manuscript also notes a tension between some colonial accounts that describe burned offerings and the evidence reported at Tambo Viejo.
Why did the Inka use coca leaves in rituals?
The 2026 journal article interprets the coca-and-animal association as evidence of coca’s important place in Inka ritual. The wider purpose of the offerings is also interpreted in relation to imperial presence: a peer-reviewed 2020 study of llama offerings at Tambo Viejo argues that dedicatory sacrifice helped establish the center and materialize Inka imperial ideology in a conquered location. These are researchers’ interpretations of archaeological evidence, not recorded explanations from participants in the ceremony. Read the 2020 study in Antiquity.
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The evidence concerns coca leaves, not cocaine, and it does not establish a general rule for all Inka ceremonies. No named statistic in these studies establishes how often coca was used in this particular kind of rite.
Was coca used only in offerings?
No. A separate 2026 study documents coca leaves and seeds in a small rectangular, semisubterranean storage feature at Tambo Viejo, mixed with clean sand. The excavator suggests the sand may have helped preserve the leaves. This is evidence of another context for coca at the site, distinct from animal offerings. Read the study in Latin American Antiquity.
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The storage study reports that four semisubterranean features were excavated in Structure 4. Its English-language page rendering gives a potentially anomalous depth unit for the coca-associated feature, so the dimensions are not repeated here.
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