Photo: MARTIN BUREAU / AFP / Getty Images
For: Real America News Updated 06 Feb 2022, 18: 00 pm EST
A team of archaeologists found almost 200 human spines held together with wooden rods that would have an antiquity of five centuries, a practice not well known until now, according to what was published in the magazine Antiquity.
The 192 specimens found, including the bones of children and adults, were unearthed in the archaeological site of the Chincha Valley, in the south of Peru 60 km from the capital, Lima.
According to the researchers, this practice of assembling bone remains would have occurred around 1450 and 1650 AD, periods that encompass the domain of the Inca empire and the beginning of European colonization.
“Our findings they suggest that the vertebrae with the sticks represent a direct, ritualized and indigenous response to European colonialism”, Jacob Bongers, lead author of the study and archaeologist at the University of East Anglia (UK) told Insider.
“We are seeing funeral behavior in times of crisis”, he added.
The end of the Chincha after the arrival of the colonizers
The Chincha culture lived in that area, made up mainly of communities of farmers, fishermen and merchants. Its greatest period of splendor, reflected in the Chincha Kingdom, prospered between the 979 and 1400 AD, later joining the Inca empire.
After the arrival of the European settlers, the Chincha population was drastically reduced, going from 18,0000 households in 1533 to 979 in 1583, the study said: “The dates coincide with this incredibly turbulent period of famine, epidemics and, of course, the Europeans who arrive and try to install a new social order”, added Bongers.
Why were the spines impaled?
Many Andean peoples of that time already visited the tombs with the remains of relatives, some of them They were buried with gold, silver and other valuable objects, which led many Europeans to loot the tombs in search of riches.
“All these data support the model that these vertebrae in los palos were efforts to perhaps reconstruct the dead in response to European plunder“, insisted the author of the study.
“The fact that there is 192 of these, is quite a lot. This indicates that it is a shared and coordinated response to European colonization”, concluded Bongers.
(With information from DW)
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