The Inca chose a 13-year-old girl for sacrifice a year before her death, fed her elite food, and gave her coca and alcohol until she died on Llullaillaco

In March 1999 Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti found three frozen children near the summit of Llullaillaco at 6,739 metres. The eldest, the Llullaillaco Maiden, was 13; the others, a girl and a boy, were 4 to 5. The Maiden wore braided hair and a feathered headdress, and coca leaves were still in her mouth. A 2013 PNAS study by Andrew Wilson and colleagues read her life month by month from her scalp hair. About a year before death her diet changed to elite foods such as maize and probably llama meat. Her coca use was high all year and peaked 12 and 6 months before death. Her drinking of chicha rose sharply in her last six to eight weeks. Wilson suggests she was chosen at puberty, perhaps as one of the acllas, the chosen women, and taken from her ordinary life. The younger children took less. The authors argue the three were treated differently by age, status and ritual role, and that the rite was a tool of state control over conquered peoples. A 2007 study of four such children found they had been raised in status before the climb. The three children are kept at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta.