Death did not remove an Inca ruler from public life. His body was preserved and kept in his own household with his lands and servants, brought out at festivals, seated among the living, offered food and drink, and consulted; a corporate lineage existed to maintain him. Each new ruler therefore inherited the office but not his predecessor's estate, which is one explanation that has been offered for the pressure toward continual expansion, though it is an argument rather than an established fact.
Ordinary ancestors were treated in a related way at a smaller scale. The dead were kept in tombs and caves on community land, brought out and given offerings, and understood to hold title to the land their descendants worked. The Spanish grasped the importance of this quickly, and made the destruction of preserved bodies a priority of the campaigns against Andean religion.
Mountains were powers in their own right, and remain so in Andean communities. High peaks were addressed and given offerings, and the Inca built shrines at extreme altitude on them.
It is at those summit shrines that the rite the chronicles call capacocha is directly attested. Children and adolescents, chosen for physical perfection, were brought from the provinces to Cusco, honoured there, and then taken to a shrine and killed, often on a mountain top. Unlike much of what is said about Inca religion, this does not rest on Spanish testimony alone. Frozen burials excavated on Andean summits, including those recovered on Ampato in 1995 and at Llullaillaco in 1999, have produced bodies accompanied by the goods the chronicles describe, and analysis of hair has been used to reconstruct changes in diet in the months before death. The evidence suggests an occasional rite tied to accessions, crises or major shrines rather than a routine one. How often it was performed, and how many people were involved, is not known.