Mummies and Mortuary Monuments Revisited: A Bioarchaeological Perspective on Ayllus and Open Sepulchers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Open sepulchers (chullpas) are typically thought to have marked the social and territorial boundaries of Andean ayllus, corporate landholding groups based on descent. This proposed relationship between chullpas and ayllus follows from colonial-era accounts of Andean mortuary practices and finds empirical support in the archaeological record, in accordance with mortuary theories that link ancestral tombs to the demarcation of resource rights. Yet, ayllus are more than closed corporate groups. They are also integral wholes composed of multiple parts and different kinds of “persons.” Drawing on a decade of bioarchaeological research, this paper explores nested patterns of relatedness and difference at a large prehispanic chullpa cemetery in the Colca Valley, Peru. Tombs at the site were built one against the other in an agglutinated fashion, suggesting that chullpa practices were as much about building affinities as they were about staking differences. Furthermore, cranial modification and isotopic data reveal that individuals buried together in open sepulchers embodied distinct identities and even relations to the land, a finding that does not undermine a relationship between tombs, ayllus, and resource rights so much as illuminate it. From a bioarchaeological standpoint, open sepulchers provide a window into ayllu practices in life as well as death.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40285.0