Rising high above the South American Continent, the Andes seem untouched by earthly struggles. But their pristine, ice-capped peaks are haunted by a dark secret: a deadly mountaintop ritual. These frozen bodies all children date to the time of the Inca, the great civilization that ruled the Andes 500 years ago.

The world's oldest, coldest archaeological detective stories

Describes ice mummies, how they are formed, and includes some of the most famous ice mummies and where they were found, how scientists study them, and what they can teach us about the past.

Reading paragraphs In 1991, two tourists hiking in the Alps saw something very odd sticking out of the snow. At first it looked like a doll’s head. But it wasn’t. It was a man, frozen in the ice for 5,000 years. Ice Mummy—first published by Random House in 1998—tells the story of this amazing discovery, from the struggle to remove the mummy from his icy grave to the creation of his final resting place: a specially designed refrigeration chamber in his own museum in Bolzano, Italy. Now updated to include shocking new evidence that the Iceman was murdered—shot with an arrow after hand-to-hand combat with an assailant—Ice Mummy will provide young readers with more chills than ever!

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Archaeology, grade: A (1), The University of Southern Mississippi , language: English, abstract: Ice mummies like Kwäday Dan Ts’inchì and Ötzi are rare treasures which can tell us as much about the past as a history book can. The mummies could form, because of the combination of cold temperatures, ice and dehydration. With the help of methods like isotope analysis and carbon dating, researchers were able to make the mummies talk. Especially Ötzi has completely changed the way archaeologists see the stone ages.

This book takes armchair adventurers and archaeological enthusiasts not only to the excavation, but back through Peruvian history as it revisits the 1995 discovery of the mummy of a 14-year-old who died or was sacrificed some 530 years ago.

A readable and fascinating account of the story of mummification from around the world.