Human spines that were stitched onto wooden posts 500 years ago as part of a creepy ritual have been discovered in Peru.
According to a study conducted by the researchers who discovered 192 examples of such spines, it could have been an attempt to restore the bodies of the dead during European colonization. They include the remains of children.
"Our findings suggest that vertebrae-on-posts represent a direct, ritualized, and Indigenous response to European colonialism," Jacob L. Bongers, lead author of the study and archaeologist from the University of East Anglia, U.K., told Business Insider.
"We're seeing a mortuary behavior in a time of crisis," he said.
The vertebrae and posts were dated between A.D. and A.D., according to their data. The researchers wrote in a new study that the Inca Empire was crumbling and European conquerors were cementing authority between 1450 and 1650. Chincha people may have revisited looted tombs and threaded spinal bones on reeds to recreate damaged burials during this period of upheaval and crisis, when Indigenous tombs were routinely desecrated by the Spanish.
The majority of the vertebrae on posts were discovered in and around chullpas, vast and complex stone graves that hosted several burials; in fact, one chullpa contained the bones of hundreds of people, Bongers said.
The Chincha Kingdom was a prosperous, centralized society that governed Chincha Valley during the Late Intermediate period, which preceded the Incan Empire.
They once once had a population of roughly 30,000 people and flourished from around A.D. From 1000 to 1400, it merged with the Inca Empire around the end of the 15th century. According to the study, after Europeans arrived and brought famines and epidemics, Chincha numbers plunged to just 979 heads of family in 1583. Historical archives reveal Spaniards routinely looted Chincha cemeteries throughout the valley, seizing gold and other items and destroying or desecrating bodies.
Because Andean civilizations respected the integrity and completeness of a dead body, it's most likely that Chincha people returned to plundered tombs and reconstructed the scattered remains in this way to try to bring some semblance of wholeness to remains that had been dispersed and desecrated.
Bongers told Live Science that ancient mortuary techniques like bone threading not only reveal how long-ago communities dealt with their dead, but they also reveal how people formed their identities and culture via their relationships with the deceased.
The investigation was published in the peer-reviewed published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity.
