Archaeologists excavating in Ecuador have discovered the rich burial of a pregnant woman and fetus who died around 1,200 years ago. But the woman's bones revealed that she was bludgeoned and dismembered and that another person's head and burnt offering were placed in the grave, which led archaeologists to suspect she was sacrificed.
"The fact that it was a woman who was pregnant might indicate that women held important positions of power, and thus their power needed to be 'managed,'" Sara Juengst, a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told Live Science in an email.
