Invasion. Disease. Death. The 16th-century Europeans arriving in Peru brought with them all manner of havoc and destruction.
But they did not only pillage the living. They also looted graves.
Now researchers say local people came up with a somewhat macabre response to restore disturbed remains – by threading spines on to sticks.
“The idea is that when [the Europeans were looting], they have to go through textile bundles that have these bodies, and so they’re ripping textile bundles, and taking out the gold and silver, and bodies are coming apart,” said Dr Jacob Bongers from the University of East Anglia, lead author of the study.
“Then local peoples, Chincha peoples, are coming back, seeing this, and trying to put their dead back together.”
The Chincha were a very wealthy society of at least 30,000 people that included fishers and farmers, with Spanish reports suggesting they were known for their sea-faring merchants.
Writing in the journal Antiquity, Bongers and colleagues report how they encountered human vertebrae carefully threaded on to reed posts while exploring mortuary sites in the Chincha valley of Peru in 2013, an area in which the Chincha kingdom flourished until the 15th century when it was incorporated into the Inca empire.
At first, Bongers said, he thought the sticks were created by the looters. But as more and more vertebrae-threaded posts were found – with almost 200 reported so far – he realised that was unlikely to be the case, adding their association with disturbed textile bundles also suggested there could be a different story.
The study reveals that the threaded vertebrae were found inside or outside large elaborate tombs known as chullpas, often on the surface, while the practice was applied to the remains of adults and juveniles.
Radiocarbon dating of three reeds and their associated vertebrae, combined with modelling and analysis, suggests the individuals probably died between 1520 and 1550, a period consistent with epidemics and famines in Peru, Bongers added. The reeds were harvested to make the posts a little later, between 1550 and 1590.
“The reed dates [are] approximately when the Europeans would have been in Chincha, and when they would have been looting these tombs,” said Bongers.
The team say their hypothesis is supported by the finding that the vertebrae were often threaded on to the reeds out of their anatomical order, and were already separated from each other when the threaded posts were created.
“That’s why the vertebrae are not in order: because they were scattered,” said Bongers.
Bongers said the study showed that even though the body parts are no longer biologically living, they continue to have social lives.
“Death was not the end here,” he said. “What we are seeing here is long-term engagement with the dead. European colonialism is not stopping local people from interacting with the dead.”
Prof Bill Sillar, an expert in Andean archaeology from University College London, who was not involved in the work, said the dating in the study was convincing, noting that finding that the remains had deteriorated before the threaded vertebrae were constructed showed this took place some time after death.
But he added that while it is plausible the action was a response to colonial looting, there could be other explanations, as many Andean societies revisited the remains of their dead – including Inca society, which periodically brought out their mummies and gave them drinks before returning them to their tombs.
“While I think it is quite reasonable to think the vertebrae were restrung and mummies reconstructed as a response to colonial interventions,” Sillar said, “I could also see it as equally plausible that this practice emerged as an aspect of Andean mortuary ritual before the Spanish intervened.”
