Category Archives: SOUTH AMERICA

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Caral: The Oldest Civilization in the Americas

Caral: The Oldest Civilization in the Americas

Caral (also referred to as Caral-Supe) is a stunning ancient city located in the Supe Valley of Peru. Today travellers can visit the Caral Ruins, which are believed to be the remains of one of the oldest cities in the Americas.

Caral: The Oldest Civilization in the Americas
Caral is the oldest civilization in the Americas.

Rewind time and the city of Caral was once a thriving metropolis for its local residents around the same time that the Egyptian pyramids were being built! Interestingly, Caral remains relatively unknown on an international level.

The ancient city of Caral

Caral: A brief history

The Caral Ruins have located about 200 km (125 miles) north of Lima in Peru. Paul Kosok, American history and government professor were one of the first to study Caral in 1948. At the time, his findings were largely ignored due to the fact that he didn’t find any typical and sought after Andean artefacts on site. Peruvian anthropologist and archaeologist, Ruth Shady, later took over the exploration of this desert city of pyramids.

The evidence collected suggests that Caral was inhabited some 5,000 years ago, between 2600 and 2000 BCE (Before the Common Era, or Before Christ). For comparative purposes, the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt was built around 2600 BCE. 

The remains of Caral are well preserved

Excavators described Caral as the oldest American urban centre, but this claim to fame was later challenged when older ancient sites were found close by. Caral is however the largest known ancient city in the Andean region. Researchers believe that the city may have been an urban design model that was later adopted by various Andean civilizations over the course of the next millennia. In this respect, the discovery of Caral answers questions about the development of other early cities built after Caral and the origins of civilization in the Andes.

The size of Caral – think BIG

Caral is approximately 60 hectares in size and was home to 3,000 inhabitants. This makes Caral one of the biggest Norte Chico sites: the Norte Chico civilization was a complex pre-Colombian society encompassing over 30 population centres in what is now known as the Norte Chico region of the north-central Peruvian coast.

Caral is only one of a total of 19 settlements found in the Supe Valley. The remains of the Caral urban complex spreads out more than 150 acres (607,000 ms) and include residential buildings, temples and plazas. The most stunning findings at Caral include the Main Pyramid, the Amphitheater Pyramid, and the residential Quarters of the Elite. The main pyramid at Caral is 60 ft (18 m) tall and almost as large as 4 football fields! Ruth Shady believes that Caral was the main focus of the civilization living in the Supe Valley.

Stairs leading up to a temple excavated at Caral

What sets Caral apart?

What sets Caral apart is not just its size, but also its age. Carbon dating of various organic materials found throughout the site indicates that the pyramids are approximately 5,000 years old!

These visitors admire the beautiful amphitheatre at Caral

Interestingly, the people that lived in Caral were dedicated to buildings with civic intensity, and dedication to construction improvements and additions, and the city saw periods of great change. They were always making and remaking the stone-and-mortar walls, plazas, and residences; building new floors; painting and repainting surfaces; breaking down walls, and making new ones. They were truly one of the first civilizations that we’re focused on making home improvements.

The artefacts: Love, not war

No weapons, battlements or mutilated bodies were found during the Caral excavations. This crucial evidence lead anthropologist Ruth Shady’s research to suggest that this was a peaceful society based on commerce and pleasure.

When excavating one of the pyramids, flutes made from pelican and condor bones were found along with cornetts made from llama and deer bones. The stunning remains of a child found wrapped and buried with a stone bead necklace were also discovered.

Another artefact found at Caral was a quipu. The quipu is a record-keeping system in which knots are tied on a rope. According to Gary Urton, a quipu was used in a binary manner, to record both phonological and logographic data. The Incas later used and perfected this system, providing further proof that the Caral civilization culture impacted the Inca Empire.

An Inca quipu that is on display in Lima’s Larco Museum

The fabled missing link

For many decades, archaeologists have searched for a missing link in archaeology or a “mother city”- a city that could answer questions about why and how humans became civilized. Researchers have long looked for the answer to this question in other parts of the world, such as in Egypt, China, India, and Mesopotamia (Iran). No one expected that the first signs of city life could be found in a Peruvian desert.

For many years historians believed that the fear of war was perhaps a primary motivator for people to build cities and form complex societies to protect themselves against threats. Caral however has no traces of warfare or weapons, yet the city became a thriving metropolis. This finding challenges modern ideas of the origins of cities as based on conflict.

A detailed map of Caral

Ruth Shady explained that Caral was home to a gentle society: “This great civilization was based on trade in cotton. Caral made the cotton for the nets, which were sold to the fishermen living near the coast. Caral became a booming trading centre and the trade spread.”

Caral was built on the basis of trade, not bloodshed. Warfare actually emerged way later in history. And this is what the finding of Caral as a “mother city” indicates: civilizations are not born in conflict – they are born in peace. It is time to re-think the emergence of civilization!

After almost 10 years of excavation, the great proportions of this grand site are now emerging in Caral, but much work remains to be done. When standing in the main plaza with pyramids surrounding you on every side, the power of a long-lost ancient city is felt. Discoveries made in the area continue to help answer the question: how and why did humans become civilized?

CHILE, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s the Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast.

A long-forgotten disaster

Broken walls and toppled stones reveal the calamity that struck Zapatero, an ancient community in what’s now northern Chile, about 4,000 years ago. The people who lived along the coast of the Atacama Desert 5,700 to 4,000 years ago built villages of small stone houses atop massive piles of shells (Zapatero’s shell-filled midden is two meters deep and spans six square kilometres). Usually, these houses stood adjacent to each other, opening onto inner patios. People buried their dead beneath the houses’ floors. The cement floors were made from algae ash, seawater, and shells—the same material that held the stone walls together.

But stones and mortar failed in the face of the ocean’s power. One house at Zapatero stands in ruins, with the stones from its walls toppled inland as if struck by a giant wave. Another lies with its stones scattered back toward the sea, in exactly the pattern you’d expect from “strong currents associated with tsunami backwash,” University of Chile archaeologist Diego Salazar and his colleagues say. In a third house, the floors are covered in a layer of washed-in sand laden with the remains of marine algae and echinoderm spines, mingled with chunks of rock, shells, and sediment ripped up from the ground.

A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

Elsewhere on the Zapatero midden, Salazar and his colleagues found similar layers of sand and ripped-up ground left behind by an ancient tsunami, along with channels gouged out by the tsunami’s strong, sudden current. When the archaeologists radiocarbon-dated shells from these layers, they found that many of the shells were actually older than the ones in undisturbed layers underneath—evidence that something had churned up the ground and ripped these older shells from their resting places to deposit them on the surface.

The same story is written in ruins and sediment at other archaeological sites along a several-hundred-kilometre stretch of the Atacama coastline. In recent surveys, Salazar and his colleagues also found geological evidence of an earthquake and tsunami that struck the region: layers of sandy, shell-laden seafloor sediment lifted several meters above sea level by seismic upheaval. The researchers radiocarbon-dated shells in these uplifted chunks of ancient coastline, along with shells and charcoal in the layers just above and below the tsunami deposits, and narrowed the date of the ancient disaster to around 3,800 years ago, give or take a century or two.

Combined, the geological and archaeological evidence points to a natural disaster of epic proportions: a rupture along a 1,000-kilometer stretch of the fault system where the Nazca Plate is slowly sliding under the South American Plate. The estimated magnitude 9.5 megathrust earthquake would have shoved parts of the coastline upward and triggered a tsunami 19 to 20 meters high along a huge stretch of the Chilean coast (and all the way across the Pacific in New Zealand, where geologists have also found deposits from a tsunami of about the same age).

The combined earthquake and tsunami struck a devastating blow for ancient people who lived close to the Pacific Ocean with a hyperarid desert at their backs. Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster.

Abandoned villages and scattered camps

The Atacama Desert is a hard place to live. It’s the driest desert in the world outside Antarctica, with less than 1 millimetre of rain a year. But people have lived—and thrived—here for at least 12,000 years. In part, they’ve pulled it off by turning to the sea.

Just offshore, the Humboldt Current wells up with nutrient-rich water, fueling a rich, teeming coastal ecosystem that’s still one of the world’s most productive fisheries. Thanks to the long, slow tectonic collision between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate, the region is also fraught with seismic hazards. But for millennia, people traded that sporadic, long-term risk for the riches of the ocean. They left behind archaeological evidence of their presence and their adaptations to life in this unique environment.

But in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami 3,800 years ago, people deserted the settlements of shell middens and stone houses that dotted the Atacama coast. The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it’s clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close.

Above the layers of sand and debris from the waves, mixed with toppled walls, there’s little or no trace of human activity at sites like Zapatero. The only evidence speaks of very short visits: small hearths and a sparse scattering of artefacts lying atop flood debris and broken stone walls. When people had to return to the ruins of their ancestors, they clearly didn’t want to stay long.

Archaeologists can see the wariness in the abandoned buildings and short-lived camps at places like Zapatero, but they can also read it in larger-scale changes that span the whole north Chilean coast. In one 100-kilometer stretch near Taltal, an area of northern Chile rich in archaeological sites, a survey revealed a 65 per cent decrease in the number of settlements after around 3,800 years ago.

Northeast view of the Zapatero archaeological in the Taltal region of northern Chile.

That date marks not only the estimated arrival of the tsunami, but the boundary between two archaeologically distinct cultures, Archaic IV (5,700 to 4,000 years ago) and Archaic V. After that boundary, settlements are scarcer, and both homes and cemeteries tend to be farther inland and on higher ground. Close to shore, what settlements there are get smaller, with fewer artifacts left buried and scattered.

Ancient mine gets the shaft

Even very important resources, like the iron oxide mine at San Ramón, were abandoned.

“Iron oxide was used as a pigment for several reasons, including the realization of pictures on stones that can be found in several sites along this region of the coastal Atacama Desert,” University of Chile geologist Gabriel Easton, a co-author of the recent study, tells Ars. These pigments appear to have been important for local communities and were involved in their rites and ceremonies.

A 3 centimetre-wide vertical crack in the wall of the mine probably dates to the earthquake 3,800 years ago, and after that, work here seems to have stopped. “The San Ramón 15 archaeological site constitutes one of the most ancient [pieces of] evidence of mining activity in the Americas, exploited since 12,000 years ago, and abandoned after around 4,000 years ago, most possibly because of the effects caused by the earthquake in the region,” Easton tells Ars.

But this is still a seismically active zone, and the risk of a major earthquake or tsunami is real. That’s why Salazar and his colleagues say the 3,800-year-old disaster they’ve revealed is important not just to our understanding of the past but our plans for the future. Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners.

Unfortunately, the Indigenous people who still live in the Atacama, including the Changos (recently recognized by the Chilean government after years of effort) lost much of their history, traditional culture, and lore to the ravages of European conquest, epidemics, and centuries of marginalization. But learning how their ancestors responded and adapted could help all of us prepare to face the next disaster.

According to Salazar and his colleagues, the aftermath of the ancient Atacama disaster is a reminder that resilience doesn’t mean a “return to the pre-shock state” but rather “the capacity of human communities to absorb changes… allowing for their long-term adaptation.”

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

1,000 Years Ago, Patients Survived Brain Surgery, But They Had To Live With Huge Holes in Their Heads

1,000 Years Ago, Patients Survived Brain Surgery, But They Had To Live With Huge Holes in Their Heads

Healers in Peru carried out cranial surgery more than a thousand years ago to treat a host of conditions – often successfully. Without the benefits of a sterile operating theatre, state-of-the-art surgical instruments, anaesthetic and pain medication, the ancient people of the South American country undertook a surgical procedure that involves removing a section of the skull using a hand drill or a scraping tool – a practice called preparation. It was used to treat a variety of ailments, mainly head injuries but even, bizarrely, a broken heart.

Gruesome: Some 900 years ago, Peruvian healers used hand drills to make dozens of small holes in a patient’s skull

Excavating burial caves in the south-central Andean province of Andahuaylas in Peru, University of California bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin and her research team unearthed the remains of 32 individuals that date back to the Late Intermediate Period (around AD 1000-1250).

Among them, 45 separate trepanation procedures were in evidence.

‘When you get a knock on the head that causes your brain to swell dangerously, or you have some kind of neurological, spiritual or psychosomatic illness, drilling a hole in the head becomes a reasonable thing to do,’ said Kurin, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbera and a specialist in forensic anthropology. According to Kurin, trepanations first appeared in the south-central Andean highlands during the Early Intermediate Period (circa AD 200-600), although the technique was not universally practised. Still, it was considered a viable medical procedure until the Spanish put a halt to the practice in the early 16th century. But Kurin, whose findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, wanted to know how trepanation came to exist in the first place and looked to a failed empire to find some answers.

‘For about 400 years, from 600 to 1000 AD, the area where I work — the Andahuaylas — was living as a prosperous province within an enigmatic empire known as the Wari,’ she said.

‘For reasons still unknown, the empire suddenly collapsed.’ And the collapse of civilisation, she drily noted, brings a lot of problems.

‘But it is precisely during times of collapse that we see people’s resilience and moxie coming to the fore,’ Kurin continued.

‘In the same way that new types of bullet wounds from the Civil War resulted in the development of better glass eyes, the same way IED’s are propelling research in prosthetics in the military today, so, too, did these people in Peru employ trepanation to cope with new challenges like violence, disease and depravation 1,000 years ago.’

A Peruvian actress impersonates an ancient female warrior in this file picture. Trepanning was common in the mysterious Wari culture

Kurin’s research shows various cutting practices and techniques being employed by practitioners around the same time. Some used scraping, others used cutting and still, others made use of a hand drill. It looks like they were trying different techniques, the same way we might try new medical procedures today,’ she said. They’re experimenting with different ways of cutting into the skull. Sometimes they were successful and the patient recovered, and sometimes things didn’t go so well. We can tell a trepanation is healed because we see these finger-like projections of bone that are growing,’ Kurin explained.

‘We have several cases where someone suffered a head fracture and was treated with the surgery; in many cases, both the original wound and the trepanation healed.’

It could take several years for the bone to regrow, and in a subset of those, a trepanation hole in the patient’s head might remain for the rest of his life, thereby conferring upon him a new ‘survivor’ identity. When a patient didn’t survive, his skull (almost never hers, as the practice of trepanation on women and children was forbidden in this region) might have been donated to science, so to speak, and used for education purposes.

‘The idea with this surgery is to go all the way through the bone, but not touch the brain,’ said Kurin. ‘That takes incredible skill and practice.

‘As bioarchaeologists, we can tell that they’re experimenting on recently dead bodies because we can measure the location and depths of the holes they’re drilling,’ she continued.

‘In one example, each hole is drilled a little deeper than the last. So you can imagine a guy in his prehistoric Peruvian medical school practising with his hand drill to know how many times he needs to turn it to nimbly and accurately penetrate the thickness of a skull.’

Some might consider drilling a hole in someone’s head a form of torture, but Kurin doesn’t perceive it as such.

‘We can see where the trepanations are. We can see that they’re shaving the hair. We see the black smudge of a herbal remedy they put over the wound,’ she noted.

‘To me, those are signs that the intention was to save the life of the sick or injured individual.’

But thanks to Kurin’s careful archaeological excavation of intact tombs and methodical analysis of the human skeletons and mummies buried therein, she knows exactly where, when and how the remains she found were buried, as well as who and what was buried with them. She used radiocarbon dating and insect casings to determine how long the bodies were left out before they skeletonised or were mummified, and multi-isotopic testing to reconstruct what they ate and where they were born.

‘That gives us a lot more information,” she said.

‘These ancient people can’t speak to us directly, but they do give us information that allows us to reconstruct some aspect of their lives and their deaths and even what happened after they died,’ she continued.

‘Importantly, we shouldn’t look at a state of collapse as the beginning of a “dark age”, but rather view it as an era that breeds resilience and foments stunning innovation within the population.’

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The 1,000-year-old surgical kit found in Sican tomb, Peru

The 1,000-year-old surgical kit found in Sican tomb, Peru

The remains of an individual who served as a surgeon during the Middle Sican period (900-1050 AD) were found by experts from the Sican National Museum in the southern necropolis at the Mausoleum Temple of Huaca Las Ventanas, located in the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary in the province of Ferreñafe, Lambayeque region.

The funerary bundle No. 77 featured an individual who served as a surgeon. This is the first discovery of this type in the country’s northern region.

Sican National Museum Director Carlos Elera reported that this discovery was made as part of archaeological investigations initiated between 2010 and 2011 in the southern necropolis at Huaca Las Ventanas.

Instrumental recovered from the tomb

“This was a research project carried out by the Museum between 2010 and 2011; the context and part of it, which was covered with soil and sand, were partially removed, and we decided to bring it in a box because the river (La Leche River) was going to destroy part of this Huaca,” Elera told Andina news agency.

“So, taking advantage of the fact that there was a donation from the National Geographic Fund last year, we decided to excavate what had been documented at the funerary bundle of the external middle part,” he added.

The investigation was restarted in October 2021 and ended in January this year at the Sican Museum. 

“This individual is of Middle Sican cultural affiliation.

The funerary bundle included a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, as well as a breastplate and a kind of poncho with copper plates and a gold hair remover,” he explained.

According to the museum’s director, there was a bottle —with two spouts and a bridge handle featuring a figure representing the Huaco Rey (King Huaco)— under the poncho.

“The bundle also included gilt copper bowls and a tumi (a ceremonial knife) (…). The most interesting thing was the set of awls, needles, and knives, several of which with a cutting edge on one side and a blunt edge on the other side; the sizes vary and some have wooden handles,” he added.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

1,000-Year-Old Gold Mask Found in Tomb Was Painted With Human Blood

1,000-Year-Old Gold Mask Found in Tomb Was Painted With Human Blood

A 1,000-year-old mask discovered on the head of an ancient skeleton was painted using human blood, according to a new study.

(Image credit: Adapted from Journal of Proteome Research 2021, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.1c00472)

Archaeologists with the Sicán Archaeological Project unearthed the gold mask in the early 1990s while excavating an ancient tomb in Peru. The tomb, which dates to around A.D. 1000, belonged to a middle-aged elite man from the ancient Sicán culture, which inhabited the northern coast of Peru from the ninth to the 14th centuries.

The skeleton, which was also painted in bright red, was discovered sitting headless and upside down at the centre of a square burial that was 39 feet (12 meters) deep. 

The head, which was intentionally detached from the skeleton, was placed right side up and was covered with the red-painted mask. Inside the tomb, archaeologists discovered 1.2 tons (1.1 metric tons) of grave goods and the skeletons of four others: two young women arranged into positions of a midwife and a woman giving birth, and two crouching children arranged at a higher level.

At the time of the excavation, scientists identified the red pigment on the mask as cinnabar, a bright-red mineral made of mercury and sulfur.

1,000-Year-Old Gold Mask Found in Tomb Was Painted With Human Blood
A Sicán funerary mask at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is similar to the one recently analyzed by archaeologists.

But despite being buried deep underground for a thousand years, somehow the red paint — a thick, 0.04- to-0.08-inch (1 to 2 millimetres) layer — had managed to remain attached to the mask. “The identity of the binding material, that had been so effective in the red paint, remained a mystery,” the authors wrote.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed a small sample of red paint to see if they could figure out the secret ingredient responsible for the effective binding. 

First, with an infrared spectroscopy technique that uses infrared light to identify components of a material, they figured out that proteins were present in the red paint.

They then used mass spectrometry, a method that can sort different ions in a material based on their charge and mass, to identify the specific proteins.

The red paint contained six proteins found in human blood, the researchers found. The paint also contained proteins originating from egg whites.

The proteins are highly degraded, so it’s unclear what bird species the eggs came from, but the researchers hypothesize that it may have been the Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), according to a statement.

“Cinnabar-based paints were typically used in the context of social elites and ritually important items,” the authors wrote in the study. While cinnabar was restricted for elite use, non-elites used another type of ochre-based paint for painting objects, the authors wrote.  

Archaeologists had previously hypothesized that the skeletons’ arrangement represented a desired “rebirth” of the deceased Sicán leader, according to the statement. For this “desired” rebirth to take place, the ancients may have coated the entire skeleton in this bloody paint, possibly symbolizing red oxygenated blood or a “life force,” the authors wrote.

A recent analysis found that the Sicán sacrificed humans by cutting the neck and upper chest to maximize bleeding, the authors wrote. So “from an archaeological perspective, the use of human blood in the paint would not be surprising.”

The findings were published on Sept. 28 in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Proteome Research.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Study Investigates the Name of Machu Picchu

Study Investigates the Name of Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is among the most recognized archaeological sites in the world. A lasting symbol of the Inca Empire, it’s one of the most visited attractions in Latin America and at the heart of the Peruvian tourist industry.

However, when Hiram Bingham first visited the ruins in 1911 and then brought them to the world’s attention, they were little known — even among those who lived in Peru’s Cusco region. 

More than 110 years after Bingham’s first visit to the site, historian Donato Amado Gonzales from the Ministry of Culture of Peru (Cusco) and archaeologist Brian S. Bauer from the University of Illinois Chicago reviewed Bingham’s original field notes, early 20th century maps of the region, and centuries-old land documents from different archives.

Their findings suggest that less was known about the site than what was previously thought.

In their paper, published by Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology, the researchers conclude that the Incas originally called it Huayna Picchu, for the rocky summit that lies nearest to the site, and not Machu Picchu, which is the name of the highest mountain near the ancient city. 

Study Investigates the Name of Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu, Peru.

“We began with the uncertainty of the name of the ruins when Bingham first visited them and then reviewed several maps and atlases printed before Bingham’s visit to the ruins,” said Bauer, UIC professor of anthropology.

“There is significant data which suggest that the Inca city actually was called Picchu or more likely, Huayna Picchu.”

The researchers found that the ruins of an Inca town called Huayna Picchu are mentioned in a 1904 atlas that was published seven years before Bingham arrived in Peru.

Additionally, they detail that Bingham was told in 1911 of ruins called Huayna Picchu along the Urubamba River before he left Cusco to search for the remains.

A landowner’s son later told Bingham in 1912 that the ruins were called Huayna Picchu.

According to Bauer, the most definitive connections to the original name of the Inca city are preserved within accounts written by Spaniards relatively soon after the region came under their control in the late 16th century.

“We end with a stunning, late 16th-century account when the indigenous people of the region were considering returning to reoccupy the site which they called Huayna Picchu,” he said.

SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Analysis Links the Origins of the Maya and Corn Cultivation

Analysis Links the Origins of the Maya and Corn Cultivation

In Maya creation myths, the gods created humans out of corn. Now, a new study from a site in Belize suggests corn really was important in the origin of the ancient Maya: More than half of their ancestry can be traced to migrants who arrived from South America sometime before 5600 years ago, likely bringing with them new cultivars of the crop that sustained one of Mesoamerica’s great cultures.

These previously unknown migrants “were the first pioneers who essentially planted the seeds of Maya civilization,” which emerged about 4000 years ago, says archaeologist and co-author Jaime Awe.

A native Belizean now at Northern Arizona University, he, like many people in Belize, has some Maya ancestry. “Without corn, there would have been no Mayans.”

Archaeologists found human remains at this rock shelter in the Maya Mountains of southwestern Belize.
Archaeologists found human remains at this rock shelter in the Maya Mountains of southwestern Belize.

The discovery reveals a significant new source of ancestry for the Maya, whose civilization spanned one-third of Central America and Mexico, dotting the region with cities and monuments at its height more than 1000 years ago.

Today, the Maya are an ethnolinguistic group of at least 7 million Indigenous peoples in Central America.

The study also suggests that as in Europe, where farming arrived with immigrants from the Middle East, farming in the Americas spread as least in part with people on the move, rather than simply as know-how passed between cultures.

“This paper is really groundbreaking,” says Mary Pohl, a Maya archaeologist at Florida State University. “This is a dramatic revelation and is really stirring things up.”

Awe, a Maya archaeologist and former director of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, had long wondered how the Maya were related to the hunter-gatherers and early farmers who brought maize, manioc, and chiles to what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. But poor preservation of bones and DNA in the hot and humid climate had left few clues.

The new study analyzes remain from two rock shelters on the steep slopes of old-growth rainforest in the Bladen Nature Reserve in southwestern Belize, a 2.5-kilometre hike from the nearest road.

Since 2014, archaeologist Keith Prufer of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, wildlife biologist Said Gutierrez of the Ya’axché Conservation Trust, and their colleagues have unearthed more than 85 skeletons from shallow graves in the rock shelters’ dry dirt floors.

The archaeologists directly dated 50 individuals with radiocarbon, finding they lived between 1000 to 9600 years ago. Then, population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University and his team managed to extract high-quality ancient DNA from the inner ear bones of 20 individuals—“the oldest human DNA from a tropical rainforest site,” Reich says.

They analyzed 1.2 million nucleotide bases across the genomes and compared them to DNA from ancient and living people from the Americas.

The comparisons showed the earliest people buried at the rock shelters, 9600 to 7300 years ago, closely resembled that of hunter-gatherers descended from an ancient migration from North to South America. But after 5600 years ago, the DNA recorded a major shift: All 15 individuals tested were most closely related to another group of Indigenous people who today live from northern Colombia to Costa Rica and who speak Chibchan languages. “It’s clearly a major movement into the Maya region of people related to Chibchan speakers,” Reich says.

The migration had a lasting impact: Reich’s team found that living Maya has inherited more than half of their DNA from this influx from the south, they reported today in Nature Communications. Half of the remainder came from the ancient hunter-gatherers who were first in the region, the rest from ancestors of people in the Mexican highlands.

The population shift eventually led to a new diet. Prufer and archaeologist Douglas Kennett at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had previously analyzed carbon isotopes from the teeth of the people in the rock shelters, which shows the kind of food they ate. As reported in Science in 2020, they found a steady increase in maize consumption over time. The ancient hunter-gatherers got less than 10% of their diet on average from maize. The first migrants from the south also ate relatively little corn. But then, between about 5600 years ago and 4000 years ago the proportion of maize surged, from 10% to 50%, providing “the earliest evidence of maize as a staple grain,” Prufer says.

The shift to maize happened hundreds of years after the influx of migrants, but the team says its results fit with the emerging story of maize cultivation. The plant was partially domesticated as early as 9000 years ago in southwest Mexico, but over the past 8 years, genetic and archaeological evidence has shown that it wasn’t fully domesticated until 6500 years ago—at sites in Peru and Bolivia. There, farmers developed larger, more nutritious cobs than the partially domesticated maize still found in Mexico 5300 years ago, says archaeologist Logan Kistler of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

Together, the evidence suggests the migrants brought improved maize plants from the south by 5600 years ago, perhaps with methods for growing corn in small gardens, says Kennett, a co-author. By 4000 years ago it had become the keystone crop. That scenario could explain why one early Maya language incorporates a Chibchan word for maize, says linguist and co-author David Mora-Marín of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In tracing the origin of one of Mesoamerica’s great peoples, the genetic and isotopic work also illuminates the evolutionary roots of one of the world’s most successful crops, says archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno of NMNH and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “It really transforms our knowledge of how maize dispersed.”

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The 2,400-Year-Old Giant Clay Vase Discovered in Peru You Probably Never Heard About

The 2,400-Year-Old Giant Clay Vase Discovered in Peru You Probably Never Heard About

On October 27, 1966, the Regional Museum of Ica discovered a unique object of unseen proportions; a massive granary bowl, until then the largest pre-Hispanic pot found in Peru.

The fired clay vessel dimensions were 2 meters in diameter, 2.8 meters in height, and sections of 5 cm on the walls and 12 cm at the base.

Inside and at different levels, archaeologists found seeds of beans, Pallares, yucca, lucuma, and guavas. No remains of stoves were found in the vicinity, the reason why archaeologists believe that the giant clay pot was transported in the distant past, approximately 2,400 years ago, from another place to where it was eventually discovered.

The giant clay pot was discovered in the Paracas region of Peru, in the Pisco Valley.

Unique, enduring, and of unusual proportions, its discovery raised numerous questions. To this date, little or no information about the massive clay pot or other similar artefacts has been made available, forcing us to extrapolate more about if it was found in the region.

Paracas, Ica, Nazca

the above subtitle mentions three names that, if you know anything about Peru’s ancient history, then they should ring a bell.

The Paracas culture was an ancient Andean culture that was edited in present-day Peru some 2,100 years ago, developing an extensive knowledge of irrigation, water management, textile production, and ceramic artefacts. More importantly, they are famous for artificial cranial deformation, by which the heads of infants and babies were elongated and deformed, producing unique, long skulls.

A collage of the Nazca lines.

Ica is an area in southern Peru that was inhabited by various ancient cultures throughout history. Home to the Museo Reginal the Ica, Ica is home to a treasure trove of history.

It was in Ica Peru where in the 1960s, a man called Javier Cabrera introduced the world to the so-called Ica Stones, a controversial collection of andesite stones, allegedly found in the Ica province bearing illustrations of dinosaurs, humanoid figurines, and what many have interpreted as evidence of advanced technology.

Today, these artefacts have been tagged as a modern hoax and discredited. archaeologist Ken Feder commented on the stones: “The Ica Stones are not the most sophisticated of the archaeological hoaxes discussed in this book, but they certainly rank up there as the most preposterous.”

Nazca is perhaps the most famous. Home to the famous Nazca lines, this region is perhaps one of the most famous in Peru. The Nazca Lines are a group of massive geoglyphs carved into the Nazca desert in southern Peru. Likely created around 500 BC, the massive lines cover a combined length of  1,300 km (808 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 square kilometres (19 sq mi).

The Clay Pot

The massive clay pot was discovered in 1966.

Its massive size is unusual, and although it may give rise to conspiracies given the fact it was located not far from the Nazca Lines, the Ica region, and the so-called Paracas skulls, the contents of the clay pot, and the material it was built from can tell us much about its purpose.

For starters, the Regional Ica Museum clearly describes the clay pot as a granary jar; an object inside which ancient people would store seeds or food. It is the biggest one found in Peru, but it isn’t necessarily the only one. Dating back 2,400 years, the massive pot was crafted around 400 BC. If we look at the division introduced by Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello, the massive clay pot was made during the Paracas Necropolis period, which lasted from around 500 BC to around 200 AD.

The Paracas-Necropolis period got its name from the fact that its rectangular cemeteries, discovered in Warikayan, were divided into several compartments or underground chambers, which to Tello reassembled a “city of the dead” (necropolis). Each large chamber allegedly would have been owned by a specific family or clan, which buried their ancestors for many generations.

Whether the clay vase originated from Warikayan, which was a large ancient settlement, or from a nearby settlement remains an unanswered question. Since objects of similar proportions have not been found in the region, archaeologists believe that the ancient clay container was brought to where it was eventually found in the distant past, perhaps as a trade or a gift from neighbouring settlements.

We do know that before it was abandoned, it was used by the ancients to store food. We know it was produced of fire clay. Its unusual size suggests that whoever built it wanted to store large amounts of material inside.

It likely held seeds or food and was covered and may have been buried beneath the ground, covered by a top. Burying the clay vase into the surface and storing food inside it may have helped preserve the food for longer periods of time, protecting it from higher temperatures above the surface.

The giant Ica Clay Vase is one of the more interesting yet lesser known artefacts, part of the history of a region where mighty ancient cultures developed, evolved, and eventually disappeared.

It proves that there is more to the region than the Ica Stones, the Nazca Lines, and the strange Paracas Skulls. It also tells us that incredible artefacts may remain buried beneath our feet, hidden from history buried for thousands of years, waiting to be excavated and restored to their former glory.