SHE WAS JUST A KID—A LITTLE girl with a pigtail. If she were alive today, she might be a Hootie & the Blowfish fan, with braces on her teeth, just starting to navigate adolescence. But this 13-year-old, whose name no one knows, lived about 500 years ago at the height of the Incan empire, when being a teenager held its own terrors. High up in the Andes, a priest cracked her skull and left her as a gift to a sacred mountain. Until last September she lay undetected, her frozen body wrapped in a fine alpaca dress and shawl.
Archaeologist Johan Reinhard, 52, a senior research fellow at the Mountain Institute, an education and research organization in Franklin, W.Va., stumbled on her mummified remains while climbing and carried her 20,700 feet down the mountain on his back. "I was 90 percent sure that I had a unique find," he says. Now the centuries-old child—perhaps the best-preserved pre-Columbian body ever found—sits in a refrigerated, glass-enclosed display case at the National Geographic Society's Explorers' Hall in Washington. In the first two days of viewing, nearly 8,000 people saw her.
She has been dubbed, variously, the Maiden of Ampato (for the mountain where she was found), the Ice Maiden, even Juanita. And she has figured, ever so slightly, in this year's presidential race. At a Democratic fund-raiser, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) joked: "In high school, she dated Bob Dole." President Clinton told the crowd if he were single he might ask Juanita out. Their humor was not universally welcomed. Clinton's remarks were called "tacky" by Peruvian scientists who felt the mummy should not have been taken out of their country. Before she goes home on June 19, U.S. scientists will have analyzed her body to learn about diet and disease in a lost world. Says Reinhard: "It's like a key to understanding Incan culture."
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