Reconstructing Funerary Practices from a Heavily Looted Tomb: A Case from the Upper Nepeña Drainage, Ancash, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Prehispanic open sepulcher collective funerary contexts are ubiquitous in the landscape of the Andean highlands. Their study has mostly focused on their architecture and setting, including their role in ancestor worship. Even though some still contain significant material and human remains, very few of these monuments have been thoroughly excavated, mainly because they are looted and supposedly decontextualized. In that sense, the highly visible nature of these tombs in the landscape has made them vulnerable to both ancient and modern vandalism. In this presentation, we discuss the preliminary results of the complete excavation of an open sepulcher funerary context of the machay (rockshelter) type on the western slopes of the Cordillera Negra (Ancash, Peru). They include an assessment of taphonomy, demography, paleopathology, funerary material, and potential chronology. We thereby demonstrate how the combination of thorough excavation and a bioarchaeological study can shed light on these understudied contexts and allow us to reconstruct the meaningful practices that shaped prehispanic Andean funerary rituals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36256.0