Human spines on sticks found in 500-year-old graves in Peru
Hundreds of years ago, Indigenous people in coastal Peru may have collected the scattered remains of their dead from desecrated graves and threaded reed posts through the spinal bones. Scientists recently counted nearly 200 of these bone-threaded posts in stone tombs in Peru's Chincha Valley, and they suspect that the practice arose as a means of reassembling remains after the Spanish had looted and desecrated Indigenous graves.
Archaeologists investigated 664 graves in a 15-square-mile (40 square kilometers) zone that contained 44 mortuary sites. They documented 192 examples of posts threaded with vertebrae.
The researchers then measured the amount of radioactive carbon in the bones and reed posts. Radioactive carbon accumulates when an organism is alive but decays to nitrogen at a constant rate once the organism is dead. So based on the amount of this carbon, the scientists could estimate when the posts were assembled. Read more.
