Actually, reading the full article it said “around 1450” I saw nothing about 1468. I was recently browsing in Sigurdson’s Encyclopedia of Volcanoes and saw a reference to Kuwae volcano which expelled 6 times the volume of ash that Pinatubo did in 1991. The first link below is a detailed research paper seeking to identify what volcano in the mid 1400s had caused world wide famine and disaster. I suspect the date given for the dead children is a few years early and this was a huge sacrifice because the harvests and seafoods had been severely
affected by the volcano which is in the Vanuatu area (Southern Hemisphere). First there might have been a big tsunami, then a couple of years of crop failures, significant changes in the fishing patterns, and then after several years of this a desperate plea to the gods through the sacrifice of children who may have been starving anyway. Any analysis of the nutritional status of the bodies???
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/Kuwae27.pdf
https://volcanohotspot.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/was-kuwae-a-killer-maybe-but-we-need-to-know-more/#comments
[This attractive site with good comments covers a number of proofs or lack of proofs for this being the big one.]
A list of big ones since 1400. http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/largest-eruptions-1400-ad
thanks for the ping, I follow your thinking, I don’t believe for a moment these people killed children and young animals for pleasure or entertainment, they had to have had, in their way of thinking, very good reasons. Assuming they were being punished by their own concept of a supreme being, a ‘gift’ of what was most precious might have seemed to them a way to persuade their gods to behave kindly to them.
Starvation and destruction due to some catastrophic event would perhaps explain the sacrifices.