Momia Juanita (Spanish for "Mummy Juanita"), also known as the Lady of Ampato, is the well-preserved frozen body of a girl from the Inca Empire who was killed as a human sacrifice to the Inca gods sometime between 1440 and 1480, when she was approximately 12–15 years old. She was discovered on the dormant stratovolcano Mount Ampato (part of the Andes cordillera in southern Peru) in 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian climbing partner, Miguel Zárate. She is known as the Lady of Ampato because she was found on top of Mount Ampato. Her other nickname, the Ice Maiden, derives from the cold conditions and freezing temperatures that preserved her body on Mount Ampato. Juanita has been on display in the Catholic University of Santa María's Museum of Andean Sanctuaries (Museo Santuarios Andinos) in Arequipa, Peru almost continuously since 1996, and was displayed on a tour in Japan in 1999. In 1995, Time magazine chose her as one of the world's top ten discoveries. Between May and June 1996, she was exhibited in the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., in a specially acclimatized conservation display unit. In its June 1996 issue, National Geographic included an article dedicated to the discovery of Juanita. Discovery In September 1995, during an ascent of Mt. Ampato (20,700 ft, 6309 m), Johan Reinhard and Zárate found a bundle in the crater that had fallen from an Inca site on the summit due to recent ice melt and erosion from a volcano eruption. To their astonishment, the bundle turned out to contain the frozen body of a young girl. Juanita was found almost entirely frozen, which preserved her internal organs, hair, blood, skin, and contents of her stomach. They also found many items that had been left as offerings to the Inca gods including llama bones, small figurines and pottery pieces. The items were strewn about the mountain slope, down which the body had fallen. These included statues, food items (maize kernels and cob), and spondylus shells, which originate from ocean ecosystems. These have been connected to rain ceremonies throughout the Incan Empire. The clothing she wore resembled textiles from the elite from Cuzco, the Inca capital. As Juanita is the closest discovered sacrifice to Cuzco and was found with textiles of the wealthy, archaeologists believe that this could suggest she came from a noble Cuzco family. The body and