Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Assembling the dead: human vertebrae-on-posts in the Chincha Valley, Peru

2022; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 386 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15184/aqy.2021.180

1745-1744

Jacob Bongers, Juliana Gómez Mejía, Thomas K. Harper, Susanna Seidensticker,

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

The post-mortem manipulation of human bodies is documented in many regions of the world, including South America. Recent archaeological fieldwork in the Chincha Valley, Peru, adds to this catalogue nearly 200 examples of the threading of human vertebrae onto reed posts. Here, the authors report on the distribution and composition of these ‘vertebrae-on-posts’, which are radiocarbon-dated to the Late Horizon (AD 1400–1532) and Colonial (AD 1532–1825) periods. The authors argue that these modified remains represent a social process that reconstructed the dead in response to Colonial-period looting. This manipulation of human remains reflects protracted relationships between the living and the dead, and the enduring social lives of human remains.