This frozen corpse of an Inca girl who lived approximately 5 centuries ago was discovered by Johan Reinhard on mount Nevada de Ampato  in the Andes mountains near the border between Argentina and Chile in 1995. The corpse is one of approximately 15 child corpses discovered in the area of an Incan sacrificial site dedicated to the Sun God. According to Incan sacrificial rites, children were killed as an offering at major transitional times including deaths and births of Incan rulers and as thanks for seasonal harvests. The children were required to be beautiful and unblemished and were either buried alive or killed by a blow to the head.

Offering young children of pure appearance was an appropriate gift to the Sun God. As this God gave of itself an endless supply of light for the production of food, the Incans offered in return that which was most valuable and pure of themselves; perfectly formed children, not yet fully developed as men or women, the raw material of human life itself. These children whose bodies survived intact for five centuries in the ice were turned into full-formed androgynes by the ravages of time which erased any signs of gender from these already semi-gendered bodies. Perhaps the Incans intended not only that their sacrificial victims would persevere the ages buried in their icy tombs, but would also travel a path of spiritual enlightenment in death by relinquishing their genders slowly over the course of the centuries, thus returning to the non-gendered source from which they came.

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