Science Daily — Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region's archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University). Conlee's analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.
As Conlee outlines in the June issue of Current Anthropology, the third vertebrae of the La Tiza skeleton has dark cut marks, rounded edges, and no evidence of flaking or breakage, indicating decapitation occurred at or very soon after the time of death. A ceramic jar decorated with an image of a head was placed next to the body. The head has a tree with eyes growing out of it, the branches encircling the vessel.
"Ritual battles often take place just before plowing for potato planting, and trees and unripened fruit figure in these rituals, in which the shedding of blood is necessary to nourish the earth to produce a good harvest," Conlee writes. "The presence of scalp cuts on Nasca trophy heads suggests the letting of blood was an important part of the ritual that resulted in decapitation."
Conlee also points to damage on the jar that indicates it had already been handled and used before being included in the tomb. This was only the third head jar found with a headless skeleton. Most are found at domestic sites, and prior research has concluded that they were probably used to drink from, most likely in connection with fertility rituals. "If the head jar was used to drink from during fertility rituals, then its inclusion in the burial further strengthens the relationship between decapitation and rebirth," Conlee explains.
Notably, there is also no evidence of habitation in the La Tiza region during the Middle Nasca period (AD 450-550), to which the head jar dates. All of the Nasca domestic sites in the area date to the Early Nasca, indicating that the La Tiza skeleton may have been deliberately buried in an abandoned settlement that was associated with the ancestors.
"Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," Conlee writes. "The decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the continuation of life and rebirth of the community."
Reference: Christina A. Conlee, "Decapitation and Rebirth: A Headless Burial from Nasca, Peru." Current Anthropology 48:3.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago Press Journals.
Published by Science Daily — Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link: 3600-4000 year-old plant microfossils and starch grains.
Heading to the supermarket to pick up some corn flour, a couple of tomatoes or a can of beans usually doesn't conjure up the notion of 10,000 years of agricultural development in the Americas--a transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures actively developing and trading new food crops. But this transition is still inadequately understood. New excavations and a growing collection of plant microfossil remains rapidly adds pieces to this puzzle.
A multidisciplinary team excavated a stone house at Waynuna, north of Arequipa on the western slope of the Andes and analyzed plant remains from three grinding stones.
Arrowroot from the Amazon. Starchy arrowroot (Maranta sp.) tubers don't grow in the Andean highlands. So the presence of tiny Arrowroot starch grains and phytoliths on the grinding stones and in associated sediments means that people were moving tubers from lowland Amazon rainforest sites east of the Andes west to the Waynuna site.
Maize from Mexico. Maize (Zea mays) cultivation also swept through the Americas in the millennia following its domestication from Teosinte, a wild ancestor from Mexico's tropical Balsas river valley, some 9000 years ago. At the Waynuna site, maize starch grains were the most common plant remains on the grinding stones. Phytoliths derived from the leaves of maize provided evidence that maize was grown at the site. The shape and grinding damage of maize particles suggests that two races of maize--one used as flour and another, popcorn or dent corn variety--were probably grown and processed at the site. The Waynuna house is older than any of the other sites in Peru where maize has been found and sets back the date of maize cultivation and processing in the region by ~1000 years.
Obsidian trade. The Waynuna site perches on the shoulders of Cerro Aycano, the northernmost point of one of the Andes' richest sources of obsidian. Ample archaeological evidence shows that preceramic peoples moved obsidian from the mountains down into the Amazon basin, so it is not surprising that travelers eventually introduced new foods to residents of this upland area.
Multiproxy microfossil analysis of starch grains and phytoliths is proving to be an extremely important tool--applied to stone tool surfaces and associated sediments, to new sites and to sites where warm, wet climates have destroyed larger plant remains. Future work is expected to yield a better understanding of the domestication and trade of peanuts, manioc and achira, staples depicted in the stone iconography of the first great cultures to develop in a region where amazing cooking is still the standard.
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The research team included members from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the University of Maine, Orono, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, along with Ithaca College in the U.S. and the Museo Contisuyo, Moquegua and the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Alameda, in Peru. This work was funded by a grant from the Heinz Charitable Trust Latin American Archaeology Program, FERCO, the Office of the Provost, Ithaca College, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a unit of the Smithsonian Institution with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, furthers our understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. http://www.stri.org/
Ref. Perry, L., Sandweiss, D., Piperno, D., Radmaker, K., Malpass, M., Umire, A. and de la Vera, P. 2006. Early maize agriculture and interzonal interaction in southern Peru. Nature, 2 March, 2006.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Science Daily — Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from AD 1 to AD 750. But despite this evidence and large numbers of trophy heads in the region's archaeological record, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, explains Christina A. Conlee (Texas State University). Conlee's analysis of a newly excavated headless body from the site of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.
