Researchers unearth 500 - yr - previous grave in southerly Peru have excavate 192 human spines meander onto reed posts .
describe this remarkable find in the journalAntiquity , the authors say this strange assemblage of human vertebrae may have provided a means for indigenous people to reconstructdead bodiesdamaged by European grave robbers .
The skewered spines were recovered from burial web site in the Chincha Valley , where the local residential area was decimate by shortage and disease epidemic come the arrival of Europeans .
According to the investigator , the Chincha population declined from over 30,000 home in 1533 to just 979 half a hundred later , and many of the dead would have been ritually buried along with precious token made of atomic number 79 .
It is therefore telling that all of the vertebrae - on - posts were date to between 1450 and 1650 CE , a period when European colonialists bust and destroyed expectant number ofindigenous gravesin the region .
“ Looting was principally intended to get rid of grave goodness made of gold and silver and would have gone hand in handwriting with European campaign to eradicate Indigenous spiritual practices and funerary customs , ” explained study author Dr Jacob Bongers in a statement .
“ These ' vertebra - on - billet ' were likely made to retrace the dead in response to sober robbery , ” he said , total that these curiously assemble human spinal column “ map a lineal , ritualized , and Indigenous response to European colonialism . ”
This possibility is game up by carbon 14 dating suggesting that the threading of these vertebrae onto reed Emily Post was carried out after the initial burial , while further archaeological grounds supports the idea that local autochthonous civilisation were concerned with the integrity of dead body .
For instance , the authors mention thatIncan child sacrificesoften involved “ non - bloody ” killing technique such as “ throttling or live burial , allegedly in the opinion that nothing ‘ uncompleted ’ should be propose [ as a sacrifice ] to the Sunday . ”
They also note that the Chinchorro people , who inhabited the nearby Atacama Desert several millennia earlier , display a interchangeable interest in keeping dead body entire , and develop the first knownmummificationtechniques anywhere in the macrocosm . To maintain the rigidity of these mummies , the Chinchorro often wind wooden sticks through their vertebrae .
Based on all of this evidence , the study authors resolve that the vertebrae - on - posts discovered in the Chincha Valley represent a lengthiness of this practice of preserving the wholeness of dead body , and was conducted so as to retrace corps that had been destroyed by looters .
More loosely , they say that such practices reflect the funerary customs and belief of ancient South American cultures , for whom “ trunk parts carry on to live societal lives long beyond biological death . ”
