All posts by Archaeology World Team

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Intact Ball Game Carving Discovered at Chichen Itza

Intact Ball Game Carving Discovered at Chichen Itza

Intact Ball Game Carving Discovered at Chichen Itza
With its complete Mayan hieroglyphic text, a Ball Game marker is discovered at Chichén Itzá.

*** Presents two ball players in the center; It has a diameter of 32.5 centimeters, 9.5 centimeters thick, and 40 kilograms in weight.

*** It must have been attached to an arch that served as access to the Casa Colorada architectural complex

 In the Archaeological Zone of Chichén Itzá, archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered a stone marker of the Ball Game in a circular shape, which presents a bas-relief glyphic band surrounding two attired characters like ball players. 

The relevance of the finding lies in the fact that it is a sculptural element that preserves its complete glyphic text.

With 32.5 centimeters in diameter, 9.5 centimeters thick, and 40 kilograms in weight, the piece was found during archaeological work carried out as part of the Program for the Improvement of Archaeological Zones (Promeza), in charge of the Federal Ministry of Culture.

The piece, named Ball Players Disc, was found by archaeologist Lizbeth Beatriz Mendicuti Pérez, within the Casa Colorada architectural complex (named after the remains of red paint inside) or Chichanchob ─located between the Ossuary and the Observatory─, as part of Structure 3C27, which corresponds to an access arch to the area, informed the archaeologist Francisco Pérez Ruiz, who together with the archaeologist José Osorio León coordinates the execution of the Promise in Chichén Itzá.

“In this Mayan site it is rare to find hieroglyphic writing, let alone a complete text; It hasn’t happened for more than 11 years,” said archaeologist Pérez Ruiz, explaining that the monument found functioned as a marker of some important event related to the Casa Colorada Ball Game, a court much smaller than the Great Game of Chichen Itza ball.

The researcher estimates that this Ball Game marker must correspond to the Terminal Classic or Early Postclassic period, between the end of the 800s and the beginning of 900 AD.

In turn, the archaeologist Mendicuti Pérez explained that the monument was found in an inverted position, 58 centimeters from the surface, which suggests that it was part of the east wall of the aforementioned arch, and its final position was due to its collapse.

He explained that it is a disc composed of rock of sedimentary origin, recognized by the geographer Arlette Herver Santamaría. The glyphic band, present on the front face, measures approximately six centimeters wide, which surrounds an iconographic interior record 20 centimeters in diameter: the iconographic and epigraphic study, headed by the responsible archaeologist, Santiago Alberto Sobrino Fernández, has identified two characters dressed as ball players, standing in front of a ball.

“The character on the left wears a feathered headdress and a sash that features a flower-shaped element, probably a water lily. At the height of his face, a scroll can be distinguished, which can be interpreted as breath or voice. The opponent wears a headdress known as a ‘snake turban’, whose representation is seen on multiple occasions in Chichén Itzá.

The individual wears ballcourt protectors. The epigraphic band consists of 18 cartouches with a short count date of 12 Eb 10 Cumku, which tentatively points to AD 894.

Pérez Ruiz announced that the study of the piece will be carried out within the Promeza; At the moment, its conservation is already being attended to.

Meanwhile, the movable property restorer, Claudia Alejandra Mei Chong Bastidas, desalinated the piece with cellulose fiber compresses and physical-chemical cleaning with distilled water.

In turn, the biologist Luis Alberto Rodríguez Catana has carried out the photogrammetry process, in order to have high-resolution images of the details of the iconography and the glyphic text, to later be studied down to the smallest detail, the researcher concluded. 

WORLD

Hidden Ptolemy text, printed beneath a Latin manuscript, deciphered after 200 years

Hidden Ptolemy text, printed beneath a Latin manuscript, deciphered after 200 years

A drawing of Ptolemy’s meteoroscope, a nine-ringed instrument used by astronomers.

Researchers have deciphered an ancient manuscript that they think Claudius Ptolemy, an Egyptian mathematician and astronomer of Greek descent, penned during the first century A.D.

Written in Greek on parchment, the text was originally discovered in 1819 by Angelo Mai, a Roman Catholic cardinal and scholar of ancient texts, who found it hidden in a library at Bobbio Abbey in northern Italy.

Now, a team of researchers from Sorbonne University in Paris and New York University (NYU) has deciphered much of the mysterious text and revealed its contents. They detailed their work in a study published on March 9 in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences.

Prior to this, experts struggled to decipher the manuscript and could decode only chunks of copy. Because parchment, or prepared animal skin, was considered wildly expensive, at some point during the sixth or seventh centuries A.D, someone had recycled the pages and printed another work — in this case, Spanish theologian Isidore of Seville’s “Etymologiae” — on top of Ptolemy’s writing. Someone also “cleaned” the paper in an attempt to read it, causing portions of the pages to turn dark brown, according to the study. 

“Angelo Mai had splashed chemicals on the pages to erase the Latin,” study co-author Alexander Jones, a professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, told Live Science. “On some pages [he] did a pretty good job of erasing the writing. And then you also have this other writing written directly on top of Ptolemy’s.”

The researchers needed a way to get an optimized view of the text, since “it was essentially impossible to read more than just a few isolated words on these particular pages,” Jones said. So they turned to a method called multispectral imaging.

Hidden Ptolemy text, printed beneath a Latin manuscript, deciphered after 200 years
A multispectral logarithmic color image showing upside-down Latin overtext in brown and enhanced traces of the Greek undertext.

“The basic idea is that different wavelengths of light have different illuminations on a page that’s written using ink of any particular composition,” Jones said.

“The technique is to take lots of digital photos with different wavelengths of light and then combine these images by adding and subtracting the signals of various proportions to see if you can bring out the writing you want to see and suppress the writing you don’t. For each page, it’s a different recipe.”

This method allowed them to “read well over half of what was written,” Jones said.

Notably, it revealed a manual, written by Ptolemy, that explained how to construct a meteoroscope, an armillary instrument used to trace distances and study the stars. Composed of nine metal rings that pivot around one another, the device could be used to orient a person as they made astronomical calculations. In the text, Ptolemy advised constructing an instrument that was no smaller than about 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, according to the study.

So how did the researchers know that Ptolemy was indeed the author of this work?

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the first and the last pages, so we don’t have an author name,” Jones said. “But things started showing up that are very characteristic of Ptolemy’s Greek vocabulary. He has a distinctive style and uses certain phrases and words that either no one else used in all of ancient Greek literature or hardly anybody unless they were influenced by him.”

The subject matter itself also offered clues.”Then we found a particular passage where the author is speaking in the first person, saying, ‘I introduced a new terminology for certain angles used in astronomy,'” Jones said.

“We also have another book by Ptolemy where he used the same terminology of new names for these angles. That’s our strongest piece of evidence that it is by him.”

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Tomb of Amun Temple Steward Discovered in Saqqara

Tomb of Amun Temple Steward Discovered in Saqqara

An archaeological mission from the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden (RMO) and the Egyptian Museum in Turin (Museo Egizio) uncovered the remains of Panehsy’s tomb, the steward of Amun Temple in the early Ramesside period, along with a collection of smaller chapels in the Saqqara Necropolis.

“The new discovery sheds new light on the development of Saqqara Necropolis during the Ramesside period and introduces new individuals that were yet unknown in the historical sources,” said Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. 

The tomb of Panehsy, which has the form of a freestanding temple with a gate entrance, an inner courtyard with columned porticoes, and a shaft to the underground burial chambers, is situated north to the tomb of the famous Maya, the high-ranking official from the time of Tutankhamun.

The mud brick walls of the upper structure are 1.5 metres high and embellished with decorated limestone revetment slabs.

These show the colourful reliefs of the tomb owner and his wife Baia, who was the singer of Amun, along with several priests and offering bearers.

Christian Greco, director of the Museo Egizio in Turin, said the most beautiful representation depicts Panehsy worshipping the cow goddess Hathor. Beneath it, Panehsy and Baia sit together before an offering table.

A bald man with leopard skin around his shoulders stands opposite the couple. This was the priest who took care of their mortuary cult, pouring out water.

Lara Weiss, a curator of Leiden’s Egyptian and Nubian collection, pointed out that during excavation work, the mission stumbled upon four smaller tomb chapels located to the east of Panehsy’s tomb, one of which is of the gold foil-maker of the treasury of the Pharaoh Yuyu.

The tombs are very well preserved, and their walls bear high-quality, detailed, and stunning decorations. Although it is a relatively small tomb chapel, four generations of Yuyu’s family were venerated in beautiful colourful reliefs showing Yuyu’s funerary procession and the reviving of his mummy to live in the afterlife as well as the veneration of the Hathor cow and the barque of the local Saqqara god Sokar.

Another notable find was made at the eastern side of Panehsy’s tomb, where a yet anonymous chapel with a very rare sculptured representation of the tomb’s owner and his family was discovered.

The artistic style of the representation might have been inspired by the statues neighbouring the tomb of Maya and Merit.

The archaeological mission aims to understand the history of Saqqara, one of the most important burial sites of ancient Egypt.

The Leiden Museum conducted research in Saqqara together with the Egypt Exploration Society of London from 1975 to 1998. Since 1999, Leiden University has been a partner in the project, and in 2015 the Museo Egizio in Turin joined the mission.

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

1,000-year-old brick tomb discovered in China is decorated with lions, sea anemones and ‘guardian spirits’

1,000-year-old brick tomb discovered in China is decorated with lions, sea anemones and ‘guardian spirits’

1,000-year-old brick tomb discovered in China is decorated with lions, sea anemones and 'guardian spirits'
The inner chamber of the ornate tomb is made of bricks shaped to look like carved wood.

A stunning brick tomb thought to be more than 800 years old has been discovered in northern China by workers renovating stormwater drains.

The tomb contained three bodies — two adults and one child — as well as several pottery items. One of these, a “land coupon” inscribed with writing, indicates that the tomb was built between A.D. 1190 and 1196, when the region was ruled by the Jurchen Jin or “Great Jin” state.

According to the Shanxi Institute of Archaeology, the tomb was unearthed by the workers in mid-2019 near the village of Dongfengshan, in Yuanqu County, about 400 miles (650 kilometers) southwest of Beijing.

Archaeologists from the institute then carried out an excavation to document the tomb, and a full report on the work was released in February, according to a press release from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS.) The south-facing tomb has similarities to others found in the region from the time, such as a ceremonial “gatehouse” on its northern wall, but it is relatively simple, according to the report.

Archaeologists say the tomb is similar to others in the area from the same time, but is relatively simple.
The entire structure of the tomb includes a buried “road”, a staircase, and a door to the inner chamber.
The square inner chamber of the tomb is capped by an octagonal spire made of stepped bricks.

The buried structure consists of a “tomb road” to a staircase that leads down to a door in the inner chamber, which is a square about 6.5 feet (2 meters) long on each side, beneath an elaborate octagonal spire made of stepped bricks. 

The entire chamber is faced with bricks shaped to look like carved wood, which the archaeologists say were not painted. The tomb also features ornate decorations on the walls, including lions, sea anemones, flowers and two figures that are thought to represent guardian spirits.

Archaeologists from the Shanxi Institute say the three bodies found there were those of two adults aged between 50 and 60 years old, and one child aged between 6 and 8 years old.

The tomb held the remains of three individuals – two adults, aged between 50 and 60 years, and one child, aged between 6 and 8 years.

Jurchen Jin

“Great Jin” was the second Chinese state of that name and it is often referred to as the Jurchen Jin state to distinguish it, said Julia Schneider, a professor of Chinese history at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the tomb’s discovery.

Jurchen Jin emerged in about A.D. 1115 amid rebellions against the region’s earlier Liao Dynasty, and fell to the invading Mongols in 1234. But for the intervening century, it was one of the major powers in China.

Although many of its subjects were ethnically Han Chinese, Jurchen Jin was ruled by an imperial family that was ethnically Jurchen, a semi-nomadic people from northeast China related to the Manchu people, Schneider told Live Science. (The Manchu were an ethnic  native to China’s northeast and surrounding regions — called Manchuria — who conquered China and Mongolia in the 17th century and ruled for about 250 years.)

Two figures portrayed on the panels are thought to be guardian spirits; one of the figures is thought to be male and the other is thought to be female.

A census in 1207 gave the population of the Jurchen Jin state as 53 million people, but “probably less than 10% were Jurchen,” Schneider said.

“What makes the Jurchen Jin so interesting was that this was a multi-ethnic empire,” she said.

While many of its subjects were oriented toward Confucianism and other ideologies it considered “Chinese,” the Jurchen Jin state developed a distinctive script for the Jurchen languages and established dual administrations to oversee its Chinese and Jurchen subjects, she said.

Chinese tomb

A pottery “land coupon” inscribed with writing found in the tomb firmly dates its construction to between 1190 and 1196 A.D.

In the case of the tomb at Dongfengshan: “I’m not an archaeologist, but my idea is that this is a Chinese tomb, based on its location in the very south of the Jurchen state,” Schneider said.

That region was mostly populated by Han Chinese, rather than ethnic Jurchen. It was possible that Jurchen dead had been entombed there in the Chinese style, but “I don’t see anything, particularly Jurchen,” she said.

The statement from CASS said the land coupon meant the structure could be firmly dated, which would provide a basis for dating other Jurchen Jin structures and artifacts found in the region.

EUROPE, PORTUGAL, WORLD

Centuries-old skeleton with massive, crippling bone growth unearthed in Portugal

Centuries-old skeleton with massive, crippling bone growth unearthed in Portugal

Centuries-old skeleton with massive, crippling bone growth unearthed in Portugal
The 3-inch-long lump of bone grew precisely where the pectineus muscle is attached to the femur and would have caused the woman severe pain.

A rare and gruesome bone growth protruding from a 14th to 19th-century woman’s thigh bone mushroomed after she suffered severe trauma, anthropologists in Portugal have found.

The 3-inch (8 centimeters) lump sprouted precisely where a muscle joins the inner thigh bone and the public bone together, which would have caused the woman debilitating pain and severely impaired mobility.

“I have never seen such [a] large bone formation,” lead author Sandra Assis, a biological anthropologist at the NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal, told Live Science in an email. “I was really intrigued by its morphology.”

The massive, “rope-like” bone spur probably formed on the woman’s femur as a result of a serious muscle injury, according to a study published Jan. 9, 2023 in the International Journal of Paleopathology.

The researchers think that this could be a rare form of bone growth called myositis ossificans traumatica, which can develop after a single traumatic accident or following multiple minor injuries.

Archeologists unearthed the maimed woman’s skeleton in 2002 in the ancient necropolis of São Julião Church, in the village of Constância, Portugal. They discovered her remains among those 106 adults and 45 children who lived between 600 and 200 years ago.

Although it was incomplete and missing the left femur, her skeleton was well preserved and indicated that she was roughly 5 feet tall (1.54 meters) and over 50 years old.

Archeologists found her on her back, with her hands resting on her pelvis, a coin on her left forearm and her head tilted to the right. Researchers later spotted the protruding lump of bone, while cleaning the skeleton in the laboratory, Assis said.

The researchers detected no fracture on the woman’s thigh bone and remain uncertain about what caused the grisly growth to sprout. They concluded that the injury was 6 weeks to a year old when she died and would have prevented the woman from making any dynamic movements or from carrying weight.

The gruesome bulge probably developed following a traumatic accident that crippled a muscle in the woman’s inner thigh called the pectineus.

This is the first time that paleopathologists document a case of this rare type of bone growth, known as myositis ossificans traumatica, affecting the pectineus muscle.

“The appearance of the femoral bone suggests a longstanding process,” Assis said. “We do not have the medical record of this female, but looking at similar clinical cases we can assume that this femoral lesion was quite debilitating.”

Nowadays, surgery can remove bone spurs, but that was not an option when the woman lived, Assis said.

AFRICA, WORLD

Scientists Trace an Ore Source for the Benin Bronzes

Scientists Trace an Ore Source for the Benin Bronzes

Scientists Trace an Ore Source for the Benin Bronzes
‘Altar group with a queen mother’ is one of more than 3,000 Benin Bronzes pillaged from Benin during Britain’s 1897 military expedition.

The Benin Bronzes — some roughly 3,000 stunning bronze artworks sculpted by African metalsmiths between the 16th and 19th centuries — were crafted from metal mined from Germany’s Rhineland region, a new study finds.

Researchers had long suspected that the masterfully crafted sculptures — created by the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, now part of modern-day Nigeria — were made from melted-down brass rings used as a currency during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but confirmation proved elusive.

Now, scientists have used these metal rings, called manillas, recovered from five centuries-old Atlantic shipwrecks to trace the artworks’ provenance, confirming that their metal came from repurposed bracelets that had been originally used to purchase enslaved people.

By tracing the manillas’ metal, the researchers found the majority had been mined from western Germany. They published their findings on April 5 in the journal PLOS One.

“The Benin Bronzes are the most famous ancient works of art in all West Africa,” study first author Tobias Skowronek, a researcher of engineering and materials science at Technical University Georg Agricola in Germany, said in a statement.

“Finally, we can prove the totally unexpected: the brass used for the Benin masterpieces, long thought to come from Britain or Flanders [Belgium], was mined in western Germany.

The Rhineland manillas were then shipped more than 6,300 kilometers [3,900 miles] to Benin. This is the first time a scientific link has been made.”

A Benin Bronze sculpture called “Memorial head of a queen mother.”

Manillas, which get their name from the Spanish word for handcuffs or hand rings, served as a currency for European enslavers — namely the British, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch and French — who sailed to Africa to trade millions of these rings for gold, ivory and slaves.

The manillas — highly valued in Africa, with different types traded among different peoples — were later made into the sculptures. Then, in 1897, British forces invaded Benin as part of a punitive military expedition, turning Benin’s royal court to rubble.

The British seized the Benin Bronzes before selling them to museums across Europe and the U.S.

To trace the rings’ murky origins, the researchers conducted chemical analyses on 67 manillas found across five Atlantic wrecks stretching from the English Channel to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and in land-based dig sites in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Sweden. 

By comparing the elements found inside the manillas, along with their ratios of lead isotopes (variants of lead with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei), to those inside the Benin Bronzes, the scientists found that both were similar to ores located in Germany’s Rhineland region.

The scientists noted that their findings match closely with the evidence from historical sources. For instance, a 1548 contract between a German merchant family and the Portuguese king details the specific requirements for the production of two types of manillas — each for a different region in Africa where one specific manilla type was more highly valued — carefully stipulating their weight, quality levels and shapes.

The discovery adds an extra dimension to Germany’s involvement with the Benin Bronzes, and to the broader story of the country’s part in Europe’s colonization of Africa.

Prior to this finding, historians focused mostly on Germany’s forestalled colonization efforts following the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, where European powers met to agree on the carving up of Africa into distinct spheres of influence.

Nigeria and the Edo State Government have long been petitioning for the return of the artworks, the largest collection of which is in the British Museum in London.

The Horniman Museum, another U.K. museum, as well as Cambridge University, have given back their collection of Benin Bronzes, along with museums in Germany and the U.S.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Ancient Wooden Tags Offer Clues to Egypt’s Climate

Ancient Wooden Tags Offer Clues to Egypt’s Climate

Swiss scientists are reconstructing the climate of the ancient world using small wooden artefacts hung on mummified remains.

Ancient Wooden Tags Offer Clues to Egypt’s Climate

Throughout history, the earth’s climate has undergone natural fluctuations. Although insignificant compared with the current crisis, these fluctuations would nevertheless have been enough to make and unmake empires.

According to recent studies, they would have contributed first to the rise of the Roman Empire and then to its fall. Basel- and Geneva-based scientists funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) are endeavouring to reconstruct the climate of Roman-governed ancient Egypt in a bid to better understand the effects it had on the history of a region or empire.

The team is aided in its tasks by remarkable “Rosetta stones” in the form of wooden labels attached to Roman-era mummies. Before sending their deceased loved one to the embalmer, families would attach a label bearing the dead person’s name, the names of their parents and sometimes a short religious message to the body.

The labels were a way of identifying the deceased, who would no longer be recognisable once wrapped in their bandages, and ensuring that embalmers did not mix bodies up.

A wealth of information in museums

The wooden labels provide more information than just the identity of Pkyris, the defunct son of Besis and Senpnouth, or the late Tsenpetese, daughter of Panahib. They also contain precious information about the climate at the time because, like all wooden artefacts, they have growth rings.

Each ring marks the passing of one year. Good years are indicated by broad rings, since the tree grew faster. Narrower rings can be evidence of years of drought.

A few pieces of wood are obviously not enough in themselves to reconstruct the climate of the time. It would be necessary to observe the same pattern in several dozen samples at least.

The greater the number of overlaps, the more reliable the conclusions. In addition, to recreate the subtleties of climate fluctuation, it is essential to compare the growth rings of several tree species with different responses to climatic conditions such as drought or extreme heat.

“That’s why mummy labels are ideal for our purposes”, explains François Blondel, an archaeologist at the University of Geneva. “Not only are there thousands of them in museums around the world, they’re made from lots of different tree species, such as pine, cypress, cedar and juniper”.

Dating climate events

In the International Journal of Wood Culture, the researcher analysed the ring sequences of over 300 labels. He then identified the overlaps – in other words, the cases where ring sequences match up with each other.

These overlaps provide an initial outline of what the climate used to be like in the eastern Mediterranean, in modern-day Lebanon, the Greek islands or the mouth of the Nile – the areas where the trees were harvested.

There are a few good years here and an unfortunate succession of droughts there, but the actual dates are still unclear, François Blondel explains. “We can’t yet assign a precise date to the rings and the events they record”.

The next step going forward will therefore be to locate these events in history. With luck, the scientists will find a datable specimen. Then, by looking for overlaps with other labels from the same tree species and region, they should be able to pinpoint the exact date. If not, they will have to resort to radiocarbon dating.

By combining several samples of wood taken along the rings of the same specimen, it is possible to statistically reduce dating uncertainty – to virtually zero in the best-case scenario.

The scientists still have to find the right specimens and, above all, obtain permission from museums for invasive radiocarbon analysis.

The search has only just started, explains Sabine Huebner. As leader of the SNSF project that is trying to reconstruct the climate of Roman Egypt, the Professor of Ancient History at the University of Basel coordinates the work of historians, archaeologists and climatologists.

“Mummy labels are just a proxy tool that we are using to reconstruct the climate of Roman Egypt, the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, and understand how climate fluctuations influenced changes in society, government and the economy”. It is a perfect example of how questions raised by ancient history can be of pressing importance to the modern-day world.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The Last Moments of 500-Year-Old Child Mummies

The Last Moments of 500-Year-Old Child Mummies

The Last Moments of 500-Year-Old Child Mummies
Three Incan mummies sacrificed 500 years ago were regularly given drugs and alcohol before their death, particularly the eldest child called the Maiden (shown here), to make them more compliant, researchers have found.

Three Incan children who were sacrificed 500 years ago were regularly given drugs and alcohol in their final months to make them more compliant in the ritual that ultimately killed them, new research suggests.

Archaeologists analyzed hair samples from the frozen mummies of the three children, who were discovered in 1999, entombed within a shrine near the 22,100-foot (6,739 meters) summit of the Argentinian volcano Llullaillaco.

The samples revealed that all three children consistently consumed coca leaves (from which cocaine is derived) and alcoholic beverages, but the oldest child, the famed “Maiden,” ingested markedly more of the substances.

Coca was a highly controlled substance during the height of the Inca Empire, when the children were sacrificed.

The evidence, combined with other archaeological and radiological data, suggests that the Maiden was treated very differently from the other two children, Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl (so named by researchers because the mummy appears to have been struck by lightning).

After being selected for the deadly rite, the Maiden likely underwent a type of status change, becoming an important figure to the empire; the other two children may have served as her attendants.

“[The Maiden] became somebody other than who she was before,” said study lead author Andrew Wilson, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford in the U.K. “Her sacrifice was seen as an honor.”

Hair analyses

To learn about the final moments of a mummy’s life, scientists will sometimes turn to hair samples, which provide a record of what substances were circulating in the blood when new hair cells formed. And because hair grows at a relatively constant rate, it can provide a kind of timeline of what a person has consumed (the length of the timeline depends on the length of hair available).

In a 2007 study, Wilson and his colleagues analyzed the child mummies’ hair to understand how their diets changed over time. They found that the children came from a peasant background, as their diet consisted mainly of common vegetables, potatoes in particular. But in the year leading up to their deaths, they ate “elite” food, including maize and dried llama meat, and appeared to have been fattened up in preparation for the sacrifice.

Additionally, the 13-year-old Maiden consumed more of the elite food than the Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl, who were both 4 to 5 years old, Wilson noted. (The three children were previously believed to be about two years older than these estimates, but a new analysis of CT scans suggests otherwise.)

In the new study, the scientists analyzed the mummies’ hair for cocaine (a major alkaloid of coca leaves) and its metabolite benzoylecgonine, as well as cocaethylene, which forms when both cocaine and ethanol are present in the blood.

The scientists created a timeline of coca and alcohol consumption for the children — due to respective hair lengths, the chronology for the younger children only went back to about nine months before their deaths, whereas the Maiden’s timeline spanned about 21 months before death.

The team found that the younger children ingested coca and alcohol at a steady rate, but the Maiden consumed significantly more coca in her final year, with peak consumption occurring approximately six months before her death. Her alcohol consumption peaked within her last few weeks of life. [Images: Chilean Mummies Hold Nicotine Secret]

The increase in drug and alcohol ingestion likely made the Maiden more at ease with her impending death, Wilson said, adding that she was discovered with a sizeable coca quid (lump for chewing) in between her teeth, suggesting she was sedated when she died.

The researchers also discovered a sizeable coca quid (lump for chewing) in between the teeth of the Maiden Incan mummy, suggesting the child was sedated when she died some 500 years ago.

The chosen one

The children’s burial conditions provide further insight into their final moments. The Maiden sat cross-legged and slightly forward, in a fairly relaxed body position at the time of her death. She also had a feathered headdress on her head, elaborately braided hair, and a number of artifacts placed on a textile that was draped over her knees.

Furthermore, scans showed the Maiden had food in her system and that she had not recently defecated. “To my mind, that suggests she was not in a state of distress at the point at which she died,” Wilson said. It’s not clear how the Maiden died, but she may have succumbed to the freezing temperatures of the environment and was placed in her final position while she was still alive or very shortly after death, he said.

By contrast, the Llullaillaco Boy had blood on his cloak, a nit infestation in his hair, and a cloth binding his body, suggesting he may have died of suffocation. The Lightning Girl didn’t appear to be treated as roughly as the boy, though she didn’t receive the same care as the Maiden — she lacked, for example, the Maiden’s decorated headdress and braids.

“The Maiden was perhaps a chosen woman selected to live apart from her former life, among the elite and under the care of the priestesses,” Wilson said.

Evidence suggests the imperial rite may have been used as a form of social control. Being selected for the ritual was supposed to be seen as a great honor, but it likely produced a climate of fear. In fact, it was a major offense for parents to show any sadness after giving up their children for the ceremony. More work on the three mummies will reveal more about the Inca society and its practice of ritual sacrifice.

“The exciting thing about these individuals is that they probably still have much more to tell us,” Wilson said. “Locked in their tissues are many stories still to unfold.”

The work was detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.