There’s a lot to like about the British Museum’s new exhibition on Peru, which takes the viewer from 200 BC to the Spanish conquest in 1532 in a short space. There are some remarkable exhibits: beautiful textiles, animated ceramics. One striking aspect of the culture (it didn’t have writing) over time was the extent to which the terrain was echoed in the belief system; the depiction of the gods routinely featured the fangs of a cat and a snake with perhaps a feather motif. And this in turn related to the order of creation – the underworld represented by the snake, the world of men, or Middle-Earth, by the cat (we’re talking jaguars, not pets), and the heavens, by a bird. The gods were ferocious in aspect.

Those gods sometimes also carried heads, human heads. Which brings us to one element of pre-conquest religion: human sacrifice. In Andean ceremonial, human heads were taken from vanquished enemies and used in fertility ceremonies and rituals. One large wrap for corpses showed jolly ancestor figures holding staffs in one hand, severed heads in the other. But, as one of the curators assured me, these heads did not come from enemies captured in battle but from members of the same society. Indeed, it seems that some families might volunteer one of their members for sacrifice.