Capac Hucha

I am at once viscerally unsettled and strangely captivated by McEwan and van de Guchte's description of the capac hucha ritual in "Ancestral Time and Sacred Space in Inca State Ritual." The image on page 362 of a petrified mummy of a child huddled in blankets, wearing ribbons/adornments in his hair and surrounded by ceremonial artifacts, is particularly disturbing yet feeds my scopophilia. The image seems almost like a violation, the flipside of something like CNN's turning away of the camera 'out of respect' when suspected weather balloon boy was about to make impact. But this reaction is culturally inflected; the portrayal of a dead child might be inappropriate and distasteful to us, but for the Inca the deaths of these children were not tragedies but noble and important sacrifices. While the technologies of representation were obviously limited for the Inca, I wonder what they would have thought of an image like the one in McEwan and van de Guchte.

I wonder how I might incorporate the capac hucha ritual into my final project. The burials themselves seem too detailed for my technical capabilities; perhaps I could look through the records of burials and find one that is near a suspected huaca site and model that. I'm apprehensive about mapping out all the ceques and the huaca sites along them; I'd rather focus on one smaller thing that I could model in SketchUp. I'm interested in learning how to model irregular terrain and better use textures in addition to just becoming more proficient in the program. I'll spend hours and hours working in SketchUp and have no idea that so much time has passed. It's a complete departure from all the other work I normally do and I really relish the opportunity to incorporate it into the project.