NOVA's Ice Mummies, an extraordinary trio of one-hour shows on ancient frozen corpses, which aired last fall, offers a judicious balance of academic commentary and excavation shots that make for some of the most riveting of recent archaeological programming. "Frozen in Heaven," the most interesting and moving, investigates evidence for the Inka rite of capac cocha, the sacrifice of children to the mountain gods. Andean villagers still believe that the great mountains have supernatural power, especially over the weather and that they must be placated. According to early European chroniclers, this was achieved by child sacrifice, and the discovery in recent decades of several well-preserved children's bodies from this period, recovered at high elevation, seems to bear this out. We are shown three of the best-known examples: a seven-year-old boy found in 1985 on Mt. Aconcagua in northeast Argentina who seems to have been fed just before death a red liquid, which still coats his teeth and clothing (the liquid may have provoked vomiting); the famous Juanita, found in 1995 on Mt. Ampato in southern Peru, who was shown by CAT scans to have died from a blow to the head; and the amazingly well preserved El Plomo boy found in Chile in the 1950s wearing magnificent textiles and footwear. The second show, "Siberian Ice Maiden," concerns the now-famous 1993 excavation of a frozen tomb on the Ukok Plateau in the Siberian Altai by Russian archaeologist Natalya Polosmak. The tomb contained the bodies of six fairly old horses, sacrificed with